


Forty Two

by DrGonzo (WastelandBaird)



Category: Milliways, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Community: milliways_bar, Drabble, Drug Use, Exploration, Ficlet Collection, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multiverse, Post-Canon, Psychological Warfare, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 20:05:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 43
Words: 48,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14220783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WastelandBaird/pseuds/DrGonzo
Summary: A collection of drabbles, ficlets and short stories focusing on Zso Sahaal, of the Night Lords Legion, and Milliways, the Bar at the End of the Universe.





	1. Introduction

Before you start reading these short stories, it might be helpful to know what Milliways Bar is. In short, it's like the name suggests - a bar. But, this isn't your local watering hole filled with drunks, burnouts and no-hopers. It's at the end of the universe, and it only gets stranger from there.

It's built out of a hollowed-out asteroid, but by who and when no one knows. The décor is changeable, but the main room has a fireplace, high rafters, a roaring fireplace, lots of chairs, booths and tables, an evil karaoke machine, a window looking out onto the end of the universe, and therefore hands down the best view in the cosmos, and a wooden bar along one wall. That's all anyone can really agree on.

There is a landlord, but no one has ever seen him, her, or it. No one ever will. That doesn't matter though, because it's Bar that really runs things. Again, the name is no coincidence. She's the aforementioned wooden bar, as sentient as they come and able to produce just about anything you can pay for. Imagine a sweet old grandmother with lots and lots of misbehaving little charges, who communicates through messages written on cocktail napkins and loves dressing people up in funny outfits at holidays.

No talk of Milliways would be complete without at least mentioning the patrons. They come from all over the multiverse, and I mean all over. On any given day you can bump into a cyberpunk skater girl, the world's greatest detective, an ancient elven king, an Irish vampire, a lifeforce-draining alien, the fastest man alive or an agent of some far-flung alliance of rebels. Every single one has a story to tell, and this is the place they tell them, and often write new ones. Just expect a good deal of them to be from 20th and 21st century Earth, for reasons no one quite understands.

The following short stories focus on one such patron, Sahaal. Or, to give him his proper name and title: First Captain Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Eighth Legion. He hails from the 42nd Millennium, but currently calls Milliways home, due to it being much nicer than the war-torn galaxy of the far future. That doesn't stop him from heading back to his original universe often, though, he is a Traitor Space Marine. He has a fair few enemies to kill and targets to destroy in his own ways. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did writing them. They've been typed out on two continents, in three countries, on four long-haul flights, and over more than nine months of free time. I think they're okay, but I'll let you judge for yourself.

_\- DrGonzo, April 2018_

Postscript: As a disclaimer, Zso Sahaal is from the Warhammer 40,000 novel _Lord of the Night_ , and is the property of Games Workshop and Simon Spurrier. No profit has been made from this whatsoever. I also urge you to seek out the original novel, as it's one of my personal favourites and an excellent story.


	2. Millitime

Not all too infrequently, time stops working right in Milliways. It took Sahaal a few months to notice it, but there's been times when he's gone into the bar for breakfast, and overheard a conversation between two patrons. Nothing out of the ordinary, but he's then gone back for dinner twelve hours later and the same two have been perhaps a few sentences on from where he left them and still eating the same pancakes and hash browns as in the morning. 

It's not just other people, he's experienced it personally. Conversations that lasted fifteen minutes for him took three hours according to the clock on his music player. Days have taken weeks, and the inverse. Once, an entire week seemed to pass in an hour, and the next day, his morning run took two whole days. 

As usual, he'll chalk it up to Milliways being Milliways.


	3. Paradox

It's early evening, and Sahaal is returning from the Bar to his room with a large plate of cheesy nachos. It's been a slow day, what with a significant percentage of the Milliways residents hung over from the celebrations last night. He's never seen Star Wars before, so his plan is to work his way through the films tonight and tomorrow, so that he can finally understand what those Warp-damned toy laser swords are about.

Now, he's got access to the library's blu-ray collection, and he's had what he assumes to be the documentaries others have spoken of on his shelf for a couple of weeks, but he has been told to skip volumes one through three. Usually, he wouldn't follow the advice of someone he barely knows, but the drunken man at the bar said that he really wouldn't wish the dialogue on anyone, including the characters. Apparently, they got some details wrong when they recorded that universe's history for posterity. Although, some people apparently enjoyed them, so who knows?

When he gets to his door, there's a pair of packages, one in a thin brown ridged cardboard box, the other in a small crate with holes for air and light. Cautiously, he sets the plate of Mexican food down, pulls out the combat knife he keeps on his belt and opens the thinner package. Inside, once he's stripped away the cardboard and a cocoon of bubble wrap, is a loose action figure, like the ones he's seen displayed around other people's rooms. This one is, well, strange.

As far as he can tell, it's a plastic representation of some sort of bipedal xenos, with backwards bending knees and brown skin. Most of it is covered by brightly coloured armour, comprising of thick orange-red plates and an underlayer bodysuit of green scale-like material. The face is a little off-putting, with its four mandibles full of sharp teeth and a bright yellow breathing apparatus jammed into its mouth. But, whilst it does look like something he'd have killed in the Great Crusade, he quite likes the figure, in a strange way. Why, though, escapes him at the moment.

Instead of dwelling on the strange figure any more, he turns to the other package. He cuts away at it with neat, precise slices to the seams, and after a few moments, it opens to reveal a plant in a terracotta pot. Sahaal, his face sporting a look of confusion under his goggles, inspects it a little closer. Given that his knowledge of botany ends with photosynthesis, he's not really able to comment on many details, except for the fact that it has thin stems with broad leaves and smaller leaves at the top, and that it's green. It also has quite a nice smell, one that reminds him of the breath fresheners that used to be included in Imperial Army ration packs, except more natural. A small plastic label sticks out of the potted dirt, and it reads, in neat but slightly smudged print: _Mentha × piperita - (Peppermint)_.

As Sahaal picks both of the items up, he notices a pict tucked into the second package. It's a good quality one, very good in fact, framed almost professionally. However, the subject matter is quite informal. It shows four figures, human by the looks of it, and all male, sitting on a fallen log in a forest at night, the scene lit by a small campfire. On the far left, there's a man with pale skin, a small tattoo of a spider on his hairless scalp, a wide grin on his face and a finger up at the camera. He's wearing dark clothing, and a few glimpses of bare torso can be seen through the coat he's hugging against himself. Next to him is a very tall and slender figure, cloaked in all black. A hood hides his or her face, but two small blue sparks shine from the shadows. In it's hand, the figure carries a long scythe, like the sort that farmers use on agri-worlds.

The next one to him is young, very young, perhaps only twenty-five Terran standard. He's in a set of urban camouflage fatigues, with some sort of crude pneumatic rifle at his feet, and is smiling joyfully at the camera, like he doesn't have a care in the world. The last man on the log, though...

It's him. It's Sahaal, with the same goggles he's wearing now reflecting the firelight. He's smiling, showing no teeth, but smiling none the less, with his hands in his lap and holding a small glass of what looks like some sort of amasec. He's got no idea how this is possible, he's never met any of these people before and he'd certainly remember a strange bunch like that. To be frank, he's been up for three days already, so he decides to just take the photo, figure and peppermint plant into his room for now, and figure out what to do with them in the morning. Given the strangeness of the entire situation, he probably should sleep on it.

* * *

Three hours and seventeen minutes later, Sahaal's eyes snap open. He'd been having a strange dream, about nachos that had been forgotten and cried out to be eaten and enjoyed, but even in his slumber, his enhanced senses are still hard at work. Right now, his hearing and sense of smell is telling him there's someone in the room with him, they're walking over to his desk and they smell of lilac and gun oil. Slowly, and trying his hardest to avoid rustling the thin sheets, he turns over, his eyes picking out the details in the darkened room as it were noon.

A person, a female human in some sort of military uniform he doesn't recognise with short blue-black hair and a sidearm in a holster is rooting through the detritus on his desk. As he watches, she pulls the pict from earlier off a pile of books and slips it into her thigh pocket. Something makes her turn around, and she pivots on her bootheel. Her eyes go wide in the darkness, and with the barest whisper, she says in an unfamiliar accent: "Go back to sleep. It is fine."

Of course, Sahaal would beg to differ, and he jumps out of bed, knife in hand and sheets draped around him. A small smile forms on the woman's face, and she presses a button. The blue-white flash that comes after blinds his sensitive eyes, and he stumbles back, blinking tears of blood from his eyes. After perhaps three minutes, or maybe close to four, he can't tell through the pain, his vision heals itself enough that he can see that the strange woman has gone, taking the pict. Nothing else is gone, nothing else is disturbed.

In its place, however, is a small note, written on lined paper torn from a notebook. The language is too formal to come from a native speaker or rather writer, and the letters are traced out with great care.

_'We cannot let you keep the note. Keep the figure and plant, they were gifts for another. He says you should have them. I am sorry for disturbing you.'_

There is no signature underneath, no mark of who wrote it. Sahaal would write it off as just the craziness of Milliways, but this feels different. Whatever it is, he's not going to figure it out tonight. 


	4. Violence

The safety of _Mordax Tenebrae_ clicks off and with a pull of the trigger, the magazine begins to empty. Bolt round after bolt round flies out from the skull-mouthed barrel, leaving white trails of propellant behind. Fyceline colours the heat-shimmering air around Sahaal and his bolter a pale blue. Brass shell casings glint in the sunlight as they hit the dirt and bounce. 

The foam-filled dummy is all but obliterated by his munitions. Chunks of the target blow off with each hit, and fragments of both the spongy foam and plastic casing spray out over the range. Thankfully, there are dividers between each lane, so that the fragments do not hit any of the other patrons using the firing range. After a few seconds, with its head and torso almost non-existant, it drops from its harness in a collection of shrapnel-pocked limbs. 

Sahaal flicks the magazine release catch, letting the straight clip drop to the metal ledge. With a smoothness that only comes from years of training and practice, he slots another one into the magazine well and cocks the Tigrus-pattern bolter. 

The dummy's time might be up, but his range time isn't even close to finished. 


	5. Business

Rorschach's World is not a planet that anyone would associate with the Traitor Legions. Once, it was a thriving hive world, with a population of almost eleven billion and six arcologies spread over two large continents. A world loyal to the False Emperor, a peaceful world, far from any wars. Well, at least, that was true a couple of millennia ago. 

Strangely for a world of the Imperium, its end came not from the forces of Chaos, or the tyranid swarms, or even the ork hordes. War had not killed Rorschach's World. That honour went to the massive supervolcano on the northern continent, which had murdered the biosphere. Ash had clogged the air recycling systems of the hives, condemning millions to choke in their homes. Aerosols of sulphuric acid had corroded metal and flesh alike. The sudden global temperature drop took care of anyone outside the hives. Death had come so swiftly that not even the richest blueblood nobles had escaped, dying the same way their workers and servants had, just in comfier beds. 

The Imperium had struck it from planetary registers, and forgotten it. Others hadn't. 

Sahaal is standing on one of the planet's motorway sections, five kilometers from the nearest petrified hive. A layer of greasy ash covers everything, from the scattered and rusting hulks of civilian groundcars to the dead illuminator strips mounted on gantries above his head. Even now, two millennia after the first eruptions, more ash is still falling, burying his armoured boots like snow on a more peaceful world. A chime in his ear takes his attention away from his surroundings to the chrono in the top left of his helm display. It is time to start. 

Working quickly, he blink-clicks the icon of a quaver on the right of his vision. A few more eye movements, and the music player app is linked up to his armour's vox-system. Sahaal selects the pre-arranged song, and waits as it broadcasts its message to the one set of ears listening on this dead world. 

_"Hey you, out there in the cold_

_Getting lonely, getting old_

_Can you feel me?_

_Hey you..."_

The song continues to play, its melodies soothing Sahaal's nerves. He's slightly nervous, but that's to be expected. Arms deals are not his forte, but then again, Bar can't get him bolt shells and fuelcells. This is a necessity. 

Roger Waters gets to the line _"Together we stand, divided we fall..."_ and then he sees the sea-green Rhino coming on the horizon. A blink cuts the song off before it can properly echo out, and Sahaal readies himself for a potential firefight. He has his bolter, with a pair of magazines that represent fully half of the ammunition he owns. He has his claws of course, and his combat knife, but what worries him is that he doesn't have his jump pack. Rationally, he knows that he couldn't bring it, that it would be useless in this ash, but still, he wants it. He is a Raptor, after all.

The APC stops fifteen meters away from him, beside a jackknifed haulage truck. For a moment, only the wind moves. Then, the side hatch swings open on well-oiled powered hinges and two Astartes step out. 

Both are in the same colours as the Rhino, and fully clad in warplate like him. Ceramite scales decorate their armour and hydra emblems grace the right pauldron of both legionaries. Each has a Godwyn-pattern bolter with a sickle clip loaded mag-locked to their thigh. Apart from their patterns of warplate, one in Mark IV, one in Mark V, they are identical. Then again, the Alpha Legion usually is. 

The legionary in Mark V speaks first. "Do you have the payment?" 

Sahaal might not have done an arms deal before, but he's seen enough in films to know what to do. "Not so fast. I want to see the munitions first." 

Muted clicks from their vox-grilles betray a private conversation between the two sons of Alpharius. This goes on for a few seconds, then the one in Mark IV nods once and heads back to the Rhino's side hatch. He returns with an olive-green munitions crate in each hand, a standard Imperial pattern with identification codes indicating their contents to be Astartes .75 calibre bolt shells. These are placed side by side on the ash-covered tarmac. Mark V goes down on one knee, and pulls out a pair of steel keys from one of his hip pouches. Swiftly, he unlocks the heavy padlocks on the pair of crates, and places the locks on the ground. With a flick of each hand, he flips up both lids, revealing the contents. Row after row of dull brass shells glint in the weak light, enclosed in protective black foam blocks. Sahaal looks over the munitions with a practiced eye. Not Legion-grade, but certainly fit for his purposes. 

He nods once in approval. "Yes, these will be fine. And the fuelcells?" 

Mark V closes the crates and replaces the padlocks. Neither party wants the ash to foul the valuable ammunition. He gives a series of hand signals to his comrade in a type of battle-sign Sahaal doesn't know. Mark IV inclines his helmed head in deference, and heads back to the APC. A minute later, he comes back out, lugging a black plastic crate. Immediately, Sahaal can see this container has a wildly different provenance to the other two. There are identification codes, but not ones he recognises, printed in stark bone white. An iron skull leers at him from the crate, the stylised reflection of mortality the unmistakable mark of the Iron Warriors. Warning icons are arranged along the bottom of the Legion emblem, promising potential radiation poisoning, corrosive contents, Mechanicum technology and a risk of explosions if the goods inside are tampered with. 

"Where did you get these fuelcells from?" Sahaal really doesn't want to be hunted down by kill-squads from Medrengard. He's got enough enemies already. 

Mark V answers in a flat, calm tone. "Surplus trade goods from the Fourth Legion. Do not worry, these are not stolen." 

Sahaal's not too sure of that, but he really can't compromise this deal by pressing the issue. "Alright then. Let's do this." He reaches into one of his belt pouches, the worn grox-leather and canvas parting beneath his armoured fingers. Out comes a small silver iPod Touch, perhaps a generation or two out of date, but certainly still usable. Much too delicate to throw, so he steps forward a few metres and holds it out to Mark IV. The Alpha Legionnaire takes it gingerly in his gauntlet. 

"What is this? We agreed beforehand that this transaction was to be in Imperial Throne Gelt. We hope you do not intend to purchase these goods for less than the stated value." 

Sahaal smiles behind his helm. "Believe me, I'm not ripping you off. I just don't have any Throne Gelt. But, whilst I have been out of the loop for a while, I'm pretty sure archeotech is still a valid currency." Real archeotech, the wonders of the Dark Age of Technology, is worth worlds. He's not stupid enough to hand the genuine article over for something so mundane as ordinance, but the Twentieth  doesn't know that. To them and to the rest of the 41st Millennium, the little silver music player and smart device is nigh on a miracle. It would  be to anyone who uses punch cards and the equivalent of floppy disks. 

Mark V doesn't speak, but from his minute twitches of body language, Sahaal can tell he has him surprised and on the back foot. Finally, he asks: "What is it?" 

"A miniature cogitator, but it primarily plays music. Not so useful on its own, but I'm sure you can find a purpose for it." 

Mark V jabs gently at the buttons, finally finding the one that turns it on. Blue-tinted light adds even deeper shadows to his decorative chestplate scales. "The machine-spirit desires an activation code." 

"One-nine-eight-seven." 

Impassive, the Alpha Legionnaire taps the short string of numbers into the iPod. "How did you know that?" 

He knows it because that's the passcode he set in his room last night, after he paid Bar for the device using a sheaf of U.S dollars. Those had been the winnings from a high-stakes Pyramids game in one of the back rooms, or at least a large chunk of them. Sahaal makes a mental note to thank Guide for teaching him how to play, then lets a lie flow from his lips. 

"I had a heretek in my employ crack it for me. It took some doing, but he got there in the end." 

Mark V nods, clearly unconvinced, but just as unwilling to put the deal in jeopardy as Sahaal is. "This is more than acceptable. You shall be considered for further business with the Twentieth Legion." He pockets the iPod, and indicates for the still-silent Mark IV to head back to the Rhino. The apparently senior legionary stays where he is for a moment, staring at Sahaal with what he swears is disbelief, but he'll never prove that. The moment passes, and the one in Mark V walks back behind his Legion-brother. 

With a roar of the APC's engine and a strong stench of promethium, the two Alpha Legionnaires head back the way they came, leaving Sahaal in the light drizzle of ash. As soon as they get out of sight, he walks over to the trio of crates and collects them. It's a long walk back to the remote waystation holding the door to Milliways, but that doesn't matter. This went much better than he expected. 


	6. Nudity

"Fuck me? Fuck you, bitch! I'm not the one who was screwing some whore from some sci-fi universe! I'm not the one who was fucking naked in a fucking Fifties Cadillac!" 

"Babe, please, I can explain, really, I can..." 

"Really, now? You can explain, can you? What, did you fall naked onto that bitch and accidentally start spooning with her? Next you'll be telling me that it wasn't what it looked like or some other worn-out cliché! You think I was born fucking yesterday?" 

"No, of course, but it really wasn't, I swear!" 

On the other side of the wall, Sahaal is cursing his enhanced hearing. Most residents of Milliways wouldn't have been able to hear anything but muffled echoes through the thick walls, but he can hear everything. From what he can gather, one of the women that comprise the couple that live next to him caught the other in the garage having sex with another woman. Given that infidelity isn't exactly a good quality in a person, Sahaal can sympathise with her anger, but he doesn't understand why she has to be so loud in denouncing her. That may be a little hypocritical, he thinks, given how he gets when he gets angry, but at least he doesn't keep innocent people from their nighttime activities. 

He's about to put down his book and ask them politely, bolter in hand, to keep it down when he hears an electronic beat and accompanying guitar begin to blast from another room, across the hallway. As the lyrics kick in, Sahaal smirks. He's glad someone out there has both a sense of humour and a solution. 

_"Words like violence, taste like silence..."_


	7. Bound

For whatever reason, on the 7th July, Sahaal finds himself unable to leave the Bar. His plan for tonight was to have a look into the Dune universe, because frankly it sounds interesting and there's a flyer on the notice board requesting pictures of the gigantic desert-dwelling worms. Given that the reward was a pound of American ham, he was more than willing to take a few images with his helm's inbuilt picters. 

Of course, that's not going to happen, since the door won't budge. It's quite obviously not a problem on his end, because he's using all of his enhanced strength and he's in full warplate to pull on the handles. Sahaal sighs, lets go of the door and steps back. He's not going to give up, but he's going to need to try and get out another way.


	8. Plot

To most, with their limited view of the galaxy, the Imperium of Man is a monolithic entity of pure power. There is no place it cannot reach, no enemy it cannot smite and no citizen who can forget its existence. It is not something to be fought. It simply is. It has existed for ten thousand years. It will for ten thousand more. You can no more fight it than you can fight the waves, or fate, or time. 

Zso Sahaal fought for the Imperium for two centuries, and has fought against it for two more. He knows that none of this true, that all of its supposed invulnerability is lies and deceit. Falsehoods made up by propagandists loyal to the Throne. There are entire sectors cut off from the main empire by vast gulfs of void and bureaucractic mistakes. Xenos and renegades flourish in the forgotten places of the galaxy. The number of planets that have simply fallen from the attentions of Terra is uncountable. It is not all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. 

The doctrine of the Imperium teaches that the domain of the False Emperor is like a mighty fortress. To some extent, this is true. It is a fortress, a society on a permanent war footing. But it is a fortress with great walls built on quicksand. The towers, bastions and catacombs are extensive and fortified, but there are as many abandoned chambers as there are full barrack blocks. 

The fortress has stood for ten thousand years because its gates are impenetrable, its walls are higher than any siege engine and its frontline garrison is made up of crack defenders with ice in their veins and blood in their eyes. Breaches have been blown, and chaos has reigned on more than one occasion, but there has always been a counterattack, and the assaulters pushed back beyond the walls. It would take an unimaginable horde, with both tactical cunning and overwhelming numbers to break the deadlock. 

Sahaal can't fight the forces of the Emperor on their ramparts. But, he can hit them behind their walls. Supply routes. Armoury worlds. Targets the rest of the True Legions could never get to. And he has the perfect weapon. Milliways. 

Every other warrior of the Long War has to use the warp and a voidship to reach targets. Ships can be destroyed in void warfare. The warp tides can turn deadly in an instant, psychic swells tearing craft apart. 

Bar won't do that. One step, and you're wherever you need to be. Simple. Without risk, or at least without as much risk. 

Sahaal can do what no one else in the galaxy can do; strike at the least defended targets in the Imperium with impunity. Let the loyalists bolster their frontlines. Let the monk-warriors of the Adeptus Astartes fight for honour and pray for war. He can stop their ammunition being made. He can prevent reinforcements reaching their destination. He can spread death and terror and pain throughout the Imperium, and be back at the Bar for dinner. 

Sahaal is going to be going to war again. It's been far too long.


	9. Crack

One Tuesday, Sahaal wakes up to see a massive crack in his ceiling. He's not sure how it came about, but it's there and it needs fixing. 

A quick check on the terminal network gives him a list of what he needs, and he goes down to the Bar to get it. He comes back a few minutes later with a plastic-wrapped bundle of tools. 

Firstly, and going from the home improvement manual he dug out from one of the library stacks, he widens the crack. The straight edged blade of his combat knife does the job admirably, giving the repair compound more area to work on. Loose fragments of plaster get brushed into a wastepaper basket. 

Next, he smears a thin layer of joint compound over the crack with a smooth taping knife over the cracked section, and tapes it up with a roll of repair tape from his belt pouches. The manual says that he has to let this dry, so he does. Sahaal goes and grabs lunch for half an hour, taking a few small sections of his armour to work on. When he comes back, with sandwich crumbs down his shirt and a bag full of cleaned servomotors, he's ready to continue. 

The next step is smoothing another layer of joint compound over the taped-up area. Apparently, he has to extend the layer out two or three metres, for reasons unexplained. But, that's what the manual says, so he does. 

After that dries, Sahaal digs into the plastic bundle and pulls out a few sheets of fine sandpaper. With this, he levels out his work to get rid of any bumps or ridges. He has to be gentle, unless he wants to dig into the tape, which is apparently the wrong thing to do. Again, the manual doesn't elaborate. He's starting to wonder if he got the right book. 

Given that everything seems to be going well so far, and there aren't wires or babelfish pouring into his room, he decides to continue. A few more repetitions of joint compound layers and sanding is all that that's left to do, and once they're done, he steps back. 

The ceiling isn't perfect, there are still some imperfections, but it's serviceable for now. He smiles. It's been a while since he was able to work with his hands like that. It feels good.


	10. Woe

The door back to the 41st Millennium brings him out into a small ferrocrete bunker filled with noise and smoke. Artillery shells, all marked with high-explosive warning runes, are held in steel racks along the walls. Most of the dusty fortification is taken up by an artillery piece, which is manned by a crew of men and women in dusty fatigues, many stripped to the waist. Sweat drenches all of them as they manually haul each round into the gun's breech and fire it.

One of the crew, a female with brown hair and a pair of tinted blast goggles on, turns at the sound of the door opening. As she catches sight of Sahaal, she shouts a warning to her comrades and goes for her sidearm. For mortals, they react fast. None of them turn to confirm the threat, they just reach for their holstered autopistols and stub revolvers, and a couple of them grab las-rifles. Within ten seconds, Sahaal has a dozen barrels pointed at him.

At the same time, a blast door in the bunker's back wall opens, allowing a Space Marine into the gun pit. This new Astartes is clad in gunmetal-grey Mark III power armour edged with yellow and black hazard stripes, and a gleaming iron skull leers out from his right pauldron. On the Iron Warrior's left pauldron, spiked molecular bonding studs jut from the ceramite. A Phobos-pattern bolter is held tightly across his chest, but unlike the mortal soldiers, his gun is not pointed at Sahaal.

The Iron Warrior shifts his boltgun, and holds up one of his gauntleted hands in greeting. "Ho, Sahaal. I see you've got my message."

Indeed he had. Sahaal had woken up that morning to find a scroll of parchment on his desk in Milliways, asking for his help as a warrior of the VIII Legion in a _'matter of urgency'_ It had been signed by Sergeant Adaric, of the Fifth Grand Company of the Fourteenth Grand Battalion, the Astartes in front of him. Accompanying the scroll had also been a note from Bar, informing Sahaal that he could get to Adaric by passing through the main door out of the bar at 05:56. He had, and had ended up here in this bunker.

Sahaal didn't recount any of that. He simply nodded and said: "Yes. It's good to see you again, Adaric."

Adaric indicates for the mortal gunners to put down their weapons, and they do so, going back to their previous gunnery duties with remarkable discipline. "And you as well, old friend. Come, I need to talk with you."

He leads Sahaal into the room he came from, closing the door behind him with a click of locks slamming back into place. This tiny space is quite obviously his command centre, with a spartan metal table that takes up the majority of the space. Said table is covered by a myriad collection of topographical maps, parchment scrolls, data-slates, sheaves of cartridge paper and leather-bound books. A pict-screen is mounted on the far wall. The left wall is taken up by a rack of mathematical equipment: wooden protractors, compasses, set squares and the like, all sized for an Astartes. Opposite, on the right wall, is a Fourth Legion battle flag, the skull icon of Perturabo emblazoned over industrial hazard stripes.

Adaric sets his bolter down and brushes away a paper chart to reveal a small control unit set into the table. With a few taps on the keys, a grainy image, taken from orbit, resolves itself on the pict-screen. "This is Solius." The image shows a spinning globe, with a few medium-sized continents and oceans on it. Nothing special, as far as worlds go. A few more taps, and another orbit-taken pict is displayed, this time of a low-lying river valley. "It used to be an Imperial agri-world, specialised in teas for the noble courts of Segmentum Ultima. After recent events, the Imperial forces this side of the Rift decided to garrison it. My warsmith decided to show them what the Iron Warriors could do. We've been successful at routing most of the Guard forces on the planet, but there's a problem with this city."

He taps the screen to indicate its location at the mouth of the valley. "Our soldiers won't attack here, because the Imperials have deployed Reivers. We can't get them to move up, not even with decimation."

There's something niggling at the back of Sahaal's mind, something he feels he needs to ask, but the mention of Reivers, he speaks up. "What do you mean by Reivers? I've never heard of that unit."

Adaric nods, and brings up an image of an Astartes, but not any Astartes Sahaal's ever seen. The armour is a bright blue, obviously that of an Ultramarine, and is of a strange mark he's never encountered before. A heavy bolt pistol of an unknown pattern is held in one hand, and a large unpowered monomolecular sword in the other. The helm faceplate is skull-shaped, reminding Sahaal of some of the modifications his Night Raptors made during the Great War.

"I don't recognise the armour pattern. Hell, the bolter pattern either."

"Before last month, neither had I. Damned Primaris Marines, we're having to rewrite all our tactics thanks to them."

At this point, alarm bells are ringing in Sahaal's head. Tentatively, he asks; "What are Primaris Marines?"

In response, Adaric pulls off his helm, environment seals hissing in protest. Underneath, he reveals a deeply tanned face lined with shrapnel scars and topped with short brown hair. Bright blue eyes lock with Sahaal's glare-filtered eye lenses. "Are you serious?" At Sahaal's nod of confirmation, he sighs deeply. “How long have you been out of the loop?"

"The last time I was here in the..." He catches himself before he says the 41st Millennium. "In the Materium, it was 993.M41." Better Adaric thinks he's been in the Screaming Vortex or the Eye of Terror than let slip about Milliways. He might like Adaric, he even trusts him in battle, but the idea of the Fourth knowing about the Bar? That sends shivers down his spine.

In response, Adaric chuckles. "Well then, welcome to the 42nd Millennium. There's a lot going on, believe me." He taps his chin in thought, then twists his mouth into a wry grin. "The whole warp-damned galaxy's been torn in half by some gigantic warp rift, and we're on the wrong side of it. Some tech-adept has revived Guilliman," and at Sahaal's shocked intake of breath, Adaric adds: "Yes, that Guilliman. And, they've developed some new type of Astartes called Primaris Marines. They're our size, nothing like the weak thinbloods we're used to, and they have a new mark of warplate that can resist our bolt shells. Not to mention their so-called "bolt rifles", which have more armour penetration and greater range than our old Ultima and Phobos-patterns. Worst of all, the bastards are learning from us. Case in point." He points to the image of the Reiver on the pict-screen.

"I thought they believed that innovation was heresy?"

"Of course the Imperials do, but it's hard to refuse a Primarch when he tells you to add a few chapters to the rulebook. Like I said, they're learning from the old Legions. These frakkers have taken tactics from the Night Haunter and modified them to be useful to idiots. Bloody disrespectful, if you ask me."

"I couldn't agree more." Sahaal's fist clenches in anger. How dare they take his father's ways and profane them by using them to serve the False Emperor? How dare they plagiarise the VIII Legion? A cold anger, a intense and nigh-bottomless rage, builds up in his very soul. He makes up his mind, then and there. These Reivers, these pale imitations of his kin, are going to die on his claws. Through gritted teeth, he asks: "How have they taken from my Legion?"

"Their entire purpose is psychological warfare. It's what they are built for, and what they excel at. You see the skull helm? There are vox-amplifiers built into that, they use them to disrupt the hearing of their foes with audio-sonic weaponry. Plus, these Reivers have something called shock grenades, which disorientate enemy troops. Not something you'll need to worry about as an Astartes, but still."

Sahaal absorbs this stoically, then looks Adaric hard in the eyes. "Where can I find these bastards? I've got some killing to do."

The Iron Warrior grins. "I thought you'd never ask."


	11. Doom

Sahaal waits for nightfall before crossing No Man's Land. Whichever military strategist or war correspondent called it that, back in the distant past, was right. No man can survive in this.

The Iron Warriors siege works are a kilometre and a half from the Imperial-held city at the mouth of the river, up in the foothills. Two hundred prefabricated artillery bunkers like Adaric's and twice that many big guns in firing pits dug into the earth. Several regiments of conscripts and renegade Guardsmen hold trenchworks that stretch from one side of the valley to the other.

These are not like the small ditches that the _Entente Cordiale_ dug into the mud of France and Belgium during the waning years of the second millennium, as the History Channel would have it. Men and women in tan fatigues dug these to transhuman specifications, under the ruthless, pitiless guidance of the Fourth Legion. These are worthy of the name 'trench'. Of course, they are still lined with duckboards and disease still festers in the clothing of their tenants. Nothing has changed there.

Nothing much has changed when it comes to the concept of a No Man's Land either, except there are more of them. The shellshocked moonscape Sahaal sneaks through is the same sort of shot-churned mud as the ancient past. Rusting coils of razor wire snake across the battlefield, adorned with rags of dirty cloth and rotting flesh. Occasionally, a mostly-intact corpse is tangled up in the wire, the barbed metal wrapping around the unfortunate like the tinsel of an Earth Christmas tree.

Bodies are everywhere. Of course they would be. There are drowned corpses in flooded shell holes and abandoned trenchworks, pale faces and bulging eyes looking into the cloudy night sky but not seeing anything at all. Shattered giblets of soldiers from both sides are underfoot, ground further into the anonymity of the mud with every step Sahaal takes. Not all of the bodies are human; twice he sees the gunmetallic-clad carcasses of Iron Warriors, torsos shredded by bolt shells and heraldry caked with grime. A great many are in fact those of war machines; Chimera APCs, Leman Russ tanks, Rhinos, Valkyrie dropship and gunship variants, even a Baneblade super-heavy, all rusting and sinking into the stinking quagmire.

An orbital strike burst the banks of the river weeks before, so every single crevice, dugout, crater, sniper's hideout, trench and disturbed grave is filled to the brim with stagnant, reeking water. Man has created strange meanders and not-quite-oxbow-shaped lakes in a fraction of the time that it would take nature, and more efficiently to boot. Perhaps not as artfully, but there are drawbacks to every method.

Sahaal crosses on foot, avoiding the temptation to use his jump pack. No matter how useful it would be, he knows the Imperials will have sharpshooters and spotters looking for traces of light from the desolate tract of land. He can't afford a flurry of las-bolts, and an artillery barrage even less so.

It takes him an hour, scrambling through the macabre mud and blood mixture the valley floor has been churned into. Searchlights provide the only illumination as he moves up to the fortified town, the beams of light sending him scurrying into cover more times than he cares to count. Finally, he hauls himself over the lip of a shell crater, and reaches the wall.

A wall, a great stone and mortar wall around the town, with battlements and towers more suited to a medieval world than a civilised one stretches out on both sides of him. Someone, probably the Ultramarines or maybe Imperial Guard combat engineers, has drilled and bolted plasteel armour plating over the stone, ruining any aesthetic the fortification once had. A shell from one of the barrages has hit it directly, creating a breach that he can exploit.

Quickly, and with the full knowledge that the breach is undoubtedly covered by myriad heavy weapons, he dashes over the metal shards that jut like teeth from the pile of stone rubble. Instead of doing what an Iron Warrior would do, and fight his way through the gap and into a killbox, Sahaal grabs hold of a jagged piece of stone and starts climbing the side of the relatively new entrance to the town. Steel reinforcement rods become handholds and cracks in the rock become footholds. In a motion that's more scrabbling than any sort of gentle ascent, he reaches the top of the wall, pulling himself bodily onto the stone slabs of the battlements.

There are no defenders, the men and women who fought here having long since pulled back into the town. Traces of them remain, mute testament to actions which will undoubtedly go unrecorded and unremembered. Dried blood, in little splatters and large pools, stains the stone. Shell casings from autocannons are scattered around the area, glinting from reflected firelight. A Guard-issue helmet lies next to an abandoned ammunition crate.

From his vantage point, Sahaal looks out over the settlement. Before the Iron Warriors came, Sahaal is sure that the little port town would have been quite a pleasant place to live, by Imperium standards. Winding cobbled lanes, tall houses with wrought-iron balconies and scalloped roof tiles. Wooden piers stretching out into the bright blue ocean, with fishing boats in every colour of the rainbow moored in the harbour. Birds wheeling overhead and people talking, loving and living in their homes and parks and plazas.

What it once was and what it is now are two very different things.

Now, the lanes are choked with piles of bricks blasted from the ruined houses. The balconies are rusting in the sea air, or else twisted knots of metal. Few roof tiles are in their proper positions. The wooden piers are rotting in place, one stiff breeze from falling into the watery depths. Most of the fishing boats still have their colourful hulls, though desaturated in the darkness and holed by gunfire. Whatever ships aren't half-sunk in the shallows are beached on the shore, their ragged sails draped like funeral shrouds over the sand. Songbirds have long since deserted the ruins, and replaced largely by carrion crows that hunt in the shells of homes for the rotting flesh of the former tenants. If there are any civilians, and Sahaal is sure there are, they are hiding out of sight in boltholes and shelters. The new citizens camped out in the parks and plazas are Imperial Guardsmen, their flak armoured shadows huddled around cookfires and gazing from broken windows.

Sahaal turns away from the destroyed beauty, and back to the task at hand. One of the wall's towers rises from the battlements fifty metres along and to the left of the Night Lord. A Fourth Legion shell has broken it open like a breakfast boiled egg, the roof mostly collapsed inwards. There are two floors to the tower, one accessible through a doorless arch from the top of the wall, the other one presumably reached by staircase inside. Sahaal walks over, careful to not give away his presence.

The ground floor of the tower is almost pitch black inside, with the only light coming from the doorway and a firing slit big enough for lasgun barrels along the wall that faces No Man's Land. A staircase, as Sahaal expected, leads up to the first floor. In the little cubbyhole created under the steps, a crate of charge packs and a couple of boxes of ration bars sit gathering dust.

Thankfully, the steps are timeworn stone, with no boards to creak and crack under his feet. Sahaal stalks up, the room above slowly revealing itself. Most of the square space is taken up by the fallen piles of stone from the roof. The few square feet of space not blocked are under the small overhanging pieces of ceiling. One of these areas is by the single window for the space, a lozenge shaped gap into the outside world that used to have glass in it.

An Imperial Guardsman kneels in front of the window, swathed in a dark grey rain poncho. The barrel of a long-las rests on the pitted lead of the window frame. The sharpshooter has obviously settled in for the night, from the small stack of ration cans and water canteens by his booted feet. A portable glow-globe, turned off to minimise detection, sits on a chunk of ceiling buttress.

The hum of Sahaal's warplate, although masked by bafflers, is still audible enough to cause the sniper to turn around, one hand on his holstered autopistol. Before he can draw it though, Sahaal grabs the chestplate of his flak armour, hoisting him into the air. With one hand, he holds the man at his eye level, whilst with the other he tears the holster and sidearm from the trooper, throwing the primitive slugthrower into the debris-filled shadows.

"Don't try to struggle. You'll only waste your energy."

The sharpshooter goes slack and opens his mouth wide, drawing in as much breath as possible. Before he can scream, however, Sahaal presses his thumb to the man's nose until he hears a crack of cartilage. Blood runs down the man's stubbly face and a stifled wince of pain forces its way through gritted teeth.

"Try and scream again, and I'll cut off your legs. Now, I want some questions answered. Are you going to comply?"

Anger flashes in his eyes, but the blood trickling into his mouth dissuades him from taking action. He nods.

"Good. Tell me where your vox-room is."

For a moment, he is silent. Then, just as Sahaal is about to unsheathe his claws and make good on his promise, the words come.

"In the top floor of the red building with the transmitter mast."

"Where are the Reivers stationed?"

"In the Basilica of Saint Ciaphas the Just, by the old Administratum building." Then, after a pause, the thought of the Reivers seems to bolster his resolve. Something in his eyes hardens, and he spits a gobbet of saliva onto Sahaal's armour. "You won't kill Guilliman's screaming angels, you foul traitor. They've killed your kind many a time, you'll be no different to all the other bastard Iron Warriors."

Sahaal dismisses the Guardsman's newfound bravado with a dark chuckle. "That's where you are incorrect, little man. I'm no son of Perturabo. I'm a Night Lord, and I'm going to leave your so-called angels begging for mercy." At that, at the realisation of just who is holding him in the air sinks in, the short-lived well of defiance dries up. Through his olfactory receptors, Sahaal can smell the sharp ammonia scent of piss as it runs down the sharpshooter's leg. His breathing goes sharp and rapid, like heavy stubber fire.

Pleading and oaths and cursing all fall out of his mouth in a jumble of syllables, words mashed together in panic. He wriggles and writhes in Sahaal's grasp, trying desperately to run somewhere, anywhere that isn't right here in this wrecked tower. Drops of blood from his broken nose shake out over his fatigues.

In response, and in the full knowledge that he won't get any more from the man, Sahaal tightens his grip. Midnight blue ceramite fingers constrict around his throat, cutting off his air supply. The man begins to choke, but strangulation would take too long. The armoured gauntlet acts like a vice, crushing his windpipe and neck with an audible crack of bone. As the Guardsman goes slack and his eyes roll back into his head, Sahaal releases his grip, dropping the corpse like a child's ragdoll.

The Night Lord turns to leave, making no effort to hide the body. Someone will come along soon enough, and raise the alarm. From there, the fear and panic will spread themselves.

* * *

The sharpshooter is the first of Sahaal's victims tonight, but he is by no means the last. Twenty minutes later, a young woman with the stripes of a corporal on her shoulder turns around at a clattering noise. She thinks she is safe, tucked away on sentry duty in the attic of a low apartment building. The scariest thing her mind can conjure up this night is a rat getting at the ration packs. Instead, she wheels round to see that the shadows have grown foot-long lightning-wreathed talons. She dies a second later, her hand reaching for her sidearm.

Next is a patrolling trooper in a dark alley, his las-rifle slung over his shoulder and an electro-lantern in his hand. The weak light, dimmed in accordance with blackout protocols, fails to illuminate much beyond the cobbles in front of him, which is why he has no warning when an Astartes combat knife slices through the air and into his neck. It bites hard, blood welling up from the ragged gash. Abruptly, the knife is ripped out as the man drops to his knees, lantern sliding from his limp fingers. Almost as soon as it pulls free, the blade flies back into the newly-created notch of a wound. This time, the monomolecular edge makes short work of the man's neck, decapitating him and leaving a bloody stump on flak armoured shoulders. The knife slides back into the darkness, and questing fingers reach out for the lantern. With a flick of a sliding switch, the sickly yellow light throws the horrific scene into sharp focus for any passers-by.

In the doorway of an abandoned chandler's shop, a sergeant with burn-scarred cheeks, short mousy hair and hard green eyes lights up a lho-stick. Greedily, she sucks in the fragrant smoke, relishing the small piece of stress relief. She has no illusions about her chances of survival in a siege led by the Iron Warriors. Her subordinates might be a little more relaxed, safe in the knowledge that the Emperor's own angels of death are with them, but the campaign ribbons painted on her carapace armour tell a different story. Infernia-Prime. Calth. Rigel Four. The sergeant knows what the Fourth Legion can do, has seen it done to the flesh of her comrades and the metal of her redoubts. She has never seen a Night Lord, only heard the gory, grisly rumours. She never sees a Night Lord, only four lightning claw tines as they tear through her armour vest, her internal organs and out of her ribcage and through to the other side. The lho drops to the cobbles, extinguishing itself on the cold stone. A second later, so does she.

Thirty one mortal lives are snuffed out on the streets of the little port town before Sahaal reaches the vox-post. A healthy mixture; Guard troopers, engiseers, zealot-chaplains, Administratum adepts. What in peacetime might have taken him perhaps ten minutes on foot takes him just over an hour, what with the craters, piles of rubble and stopping to kill the unfortunate Guardsmen on his path.

There is also the alarm problem. As in, one has been set off. In the few short minutes between the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth kills, some of his earlier handiwork is found, and it takes no time at all for word to reach a command centre somewhere in the city. A switch is flicked. Sirens blare out into the cold night air, and the sleeping main garrison is roused to find the intruder.

It is an annoyance to him, nothing more. The Reivers are the only real threat to him, the mobilising troopers no more of a pressing issue on his mind than the structural soundness of the ruins he creeps through.

He easily reaches the vox-post without anyone finding him and with a couple more kills to tonight's tally, and finds the building to be just as the dead sniper had described. Four stories of red brick topped by a slanted, tiled roof and adorned with several high-powered, ultra-low-frequency vox antenna stretches into the cloudy night sky. At intervals, white window frames punctuate the outside walls, the paint flaking and fading in the sea air. Airbursts, shockwaves and shellfire have shattered the glass from the frames, and the new occupants have taped translucent sheets of plastek over the holes to keep the weather out. It's through one of these on the ground floor that Sahaal gains access, quickly and quietly tearing away the covering.

Inside, he finds a sight common across the human-controlled regions of the galaxy. A hab-room, the furniture made to basic specifications with the occasional local touch. Three rooms, the main lounge and kitchenette, the bathroom and the bedroom. Sahaal comes through into the first one, the cooking unit and food cupboards in a corner to his right, a low couch in the centre and a civilian worship pict-screen is mounted on the left-hand wall. The glow-globes on the ceiling are dark and dead, from shrapnel slicing apart power lines. Very little decoration can be found, a few framed picts on the walls and a wooden sculpture of some saint with nine mortal wounds carved into her chest on the table.

His black, glare-filtered eyes rove over the picts, taking the glassy eyes and dead smiles of the previous occupants. A family; two men with their arms around a trio of daughters, presumably adopted. All are grinning, looking directly into the picter with rapt attention. Sun damage has faded the palette of colours to a few shades of light blue and white, but there are still details for him to pick out.

They seem happy. In every single pict, they seem full of life and love and hope.

As he leaves, he knocks the figurine of the saint off the table and grinds it beneath his boot. He has a job to do.

* * *

Carefully, he pushes the hab's front door open and looks down the thin-carpeted hallway. To his right, stairs lead up to the higher floors. To his left, a small lobby, with a mail receptacle and a reception desk. Neither grabs his attention, but the Guardsman standing ram-rod straight by the desk does.

A soft rhythm comes from the man, whistled from pursed lips and tapped out on the cloth-wrapped stock of a las-rifle. Sahaal doesn't recognise the song, but then again, it's not twentieth century or a Crusade-era classical march, so he wouldn't. It doesn't matter. Soon enough, the man won't be whistling or tapping anymore.

Sahaal digs his thumb into the plaster of the hallway wall and prises out a few small chunks. He tosses them at the trooper's flak armoured back. They hit with a clack and the man nearly jumps out of his skin, half-shouting a curse in surprise. Then, his training takes over, and he wheels around, lasgun up and ready to fire. It doesn't help him.

Thirty centimetres of thick, sharp phosphated carbon steel embeds itself in his eye socket with all the force expected from a combat knife thrown by an Astartes. Blood spurts from the wound, splattering across his uniform and the cream-painted walls. Most would say, when asked, that such a wound would be immediately fatal to a mortal man, Sahaal amongst them. But, for this particular lowly soldier, it is not.

A scream, surprisingly dignified for a dying man, tears itself from his throat before Sahaal can stop him. He drops dead as the Night Lord races over to grab his knife, well aware that someone upstairs almost certainly heard that. Commotion, shouting and the harsh bark of orders only confirms his hypothesis. The time for stealth is over, if it already wasn't when the alarms went off.

No matter. He smiles behind his respirator unit, a wicked smirk full of the wrong sort of humour. Now Sahaal can really get to work.

The stairs aren't an option. Too much chance of having some Guard troopers take him out through sheer weight of fire from above, in tight quarters where he can't use his jump pack. As the thought crosses his mind, his smile widens. He gets an idea.

* * *

A few weeks earlier, if Sahaal had done the same thing, a flurry of razor-sharp glass shards would have flown into the vox-post, shredding apart the occupants and their equipment both. Tonight, going feet-first through the large window on the top floor only results in tearing down the plastek sheet and ripping a few gashes in it with his foot-claws.

Not the most dramatic or fear-inspiring entrance he's ever pulled off, but it has the desired effect nonetheless.

The three Guardsmen in the room leap back from the window, fear in their eyes and sweat beading on their skin. Sahaal fancies that, in that moment, he can see the most primitive parts of their brains enter fight-or-flight mode. He can certainly tell who is responding to which instinct.

The tall whipcord man in the peaked cap recovers first, quashing the desire to run as far and as fast as he can with indoctrination and training. As his hand dips towards the bolt pistol holstered on his hip, Sahaal sees the insignia of a major flash on the collar of his greatcoat. Wasting no time, he shouts into the headset vox-mic held in front of his lips.

"Code Red, Code Red, all personnel respond. I have a confirmed Heretic Astartes incursion at primary communications post." Then, a small amount of his dread shines through despite his best efforts. "This is Major Retslaf, I've got eyes on a fragging Night Lord, I need assistance as soon as possible!"

If he has any more to say, he doesn't get the chance. _Unguis Raptus_ slashes through his coat and carapace vest, and he sprawls out into a tangled mess of bloody limbs on the floor. The bolt pistol, unholstered during his desperate cry, falls besides him, unfired.

The second trooper, a woman with a tin canteen cup of steaming recaff in her hand, snaps back to reality with the death rattle of her superior. She drops the mug, the scalding black liquid staining the cheap pale carpet in a sticky pool. With one eye locked onto the Space Marine in front her, she goes for her rifle, a wire-stocked lasgun propped up against a storage crate. As she does so, Sahaal draws his ornate bolter in a smooth, practiced motion.

He'd heard the message go out over the vox, he knows that they'll be looking for him and him specifically. The patrols will be warned to expect Eighth Legion. Tactics will be shifted and swapped accordingly. A new wave of fear will spread thanks to the major, as the line troopers realise exactly what they're fighting. The least Sahaal can do is to prove the dead man's words in the minds of his subordinates.

A bolt shell slams through the woman's ribcage with a sound not unlike splintering twigs. She has a horrible, pain-filled second to realise her fate as the micro-fuse clicks down. Her wide eyes dart from the ragged hole and growing bloodstain to the smoking barrel of the boltgun. The shell detonates, tearing her torso into to fist-sized chunks.

The third trooper, a pale man with a shaven head sitting by a vox-caster, has not moved an inch since Sahaal's entry. He stares up, mouth gaping and dumbfounded. Another shot from the bolter turns his head into a thin pink mist, and his body slackens in the chair.

Even before the sound of the shots dies away, he's getting to work. In the old days of the Great Crusade, the Eighth Legion had a lot of ways to inspire fear. Pict-screens mounted on dropships and personnel carriers, playing the final moments of earlier kills over and over again. Flooding the vox-channels with pre-recorded screams to let enemies know exactly what they faced. Skulls hung on chains from warplate and body parts lashed to banner poles.  The problem with this approach is the ability of the human mind to become jaded to horror. Enough flayed bodies, and survival instinct takes over and it no longer inspires the same dread as it once did.

That does not mean that Sahaal has lost his faith in psychological warfare. Quite the opposite. It merely means that he has embraced the fact that the fear of death is not the only primal phobia the human subconscious has treasured down the centuries.

Fear of the dark. Fear of fire. And, most importantly, the fear of the unknown.

Sahaal pulls a data-wafer from one of his pouches and slots it into the side of the blood-splattered vox-set. The last fear is what he really wants to exploit, and what could be more unknown than something not even of this universe?

With a click and a blurt of vox-corruption, the music starts playing. At first, it's only through the headphones wired into the set and the crackly speaker stack to his left. But, as Sahaal listens, he begins to hear the electric guitar and cowbell come faintly through the shattered windows, carried on the night air from other speakers throughout the ruined town. Comm-beads, loudhailers, prayer-amplifiers. Every one united in a common sound.

Sahaal drops out of the vox-post through the tattered sheeting, landing on the cobbles below. He can see the jostling beams of underslung lamp-packs, hear the blaring song and the confusion of the soldiers spilling out onto the streets. He can practically taste the fear of the mortals, a sweet tang in the deep blue darkness of early morning.

So many thoughts must be running through their heads right now, so many questions:

_"What could this be?"_

_"Why now, why tonight, of all nights?"_

_"Is it true? Is there a Night Lord abroad in these shadowy streets?"_

_"Is my very soul at risk from this heretical dirge?"_

These are the questions that are undoubtedly being asked, but they are fundamentally the wrong ones. If any of the Guardsmen had any real intelligence, they would start to think about how they could have the best chance to survive the night. Nothing more.

With the regular beat of the track coming in through his helm's audio receptors, Sahaal resumes his previous work. Albeit with a little less subtlety.

A grenade flies into the knot of troopers in the street. One gets a warning off in some strange combat-cant, shouting at his comrades to hit the deck. Those that heed his words live. Those that don't die in an expanding sphere of shrapnel. Half a dozen men pick themselves up a few seconds later, deafened and covered in blood that isn't their own. Beams of thin white light start searching again, more frantically this time. They find nothing. He has already left.

It goes on like that. Attacks from the shadows or from above. Grenades into fire teams searching assigned quadrants on foot. Officers and commissars pulled out of view and then shoved back into the wan light of portable glow-globes, disembowelled and dismembered. Once in a while, he finds a munitions cache and blows it to the warp, shaking the already rickety walls even further. He even tears the turret hatch off a Leman Russ-class battle tank and reaches down into the crew compartment with his claws. Every single one of the men and women manning the camouflage-painted war machine is rended into bloody giblets within a minute. With nowhere to go, the blood pools ankle-deep around the driver's pit and the shell racks.

All the while, every audio output in the small, traumatised city keeps playing its incomprehensible recorded litany. No matter what the Guardsmen do, they simply cannot block out the melodic chanting. Each clutches their aquila and weapon as tightly as humanly possible. In their fear-addled minds, no immortal soul is safe from the corrupting influence of the strange words that sound like they should be so familiar but so alien and wrong at the same time.

All the while, the melody continues, blasting out into the darkness accompanied by the so very apt words. In Sahaal's mind, it's a shame none of his prey can understand the English lyrics.

_"All our times have come,_

_Here but now they're gone._

_Seasons don't fear the reaper,_

_Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain._

_We can be like they are,_

_Come on baby,_

_Don't fear the Reaper_

_Baby, take my hand..."_

All the while, Sahaal is laughing, a cruel, blackly humorous mix of chuckling and cackling, distorted by his helm's external vocalisers to something nigh on monstrous. Every single being that hears that laugh dies within minutes. Without exception.

* * *

Like all rampages, Sahaal's continues until it is stopped. In this case, by a bolt shell cracking against his chestplate in mid-air.

By the time that happens, the battle playlist has moved on from Blue Oyster Cult. Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Queen, and the occasional snatch of psychedelic Pink Floyd. All have been introduced to the 42nd Millennium, with a fairly positive response, in Sahaal's eyes.

The third chorus of Shoot to Thrill is blasting out, and Sahaal is held aloft by the twinned thrusters on his back. He's mid-leap, flying through the night from one street to another when he hears a gunshot. It sounds like a bolt pistol, but not any pattern he's ever come across. Deeper, more resonant in the brick and cobble canyons of the port town.

The hammerblow that is the round hitting his chest knocks him out of the sky, and knocks the analytical part of his mind into the background of his mind.

It's been so long since he was truly hurt. Equixus was the last time, that horrific week or so in which he gained the same amount of scars as an average system-wide campaign. A dozen broken bones, an arm rendered useless by that bastard Acerbus, more bruises and contusions and gashes than he wants to think about. Milliways healed it all, the advanced medical technology in the infirmary leaving only pale grey raised scar tissue, and since then the worst Sahaal's had to deal with is cutting his fingers when sharpening his combat knife.

These last few months, there has been pain. Of course there has been. But nothing like he's used to. Agony has become academic, a memory left in the past and smothered by soft sheets and good company.

When the round hits him and knocks the air out of all three of his lungs, it hurts. When it detonates, and red-hot shards of bolt shell slice through the thin flexible armour around his joints, it's all he can do to not scream.

He drops from the sky, frantically switching off his jump pack by blink-clicking two dozen helm display icons. As he falls, damage and impact notification runes flash up before his eyes, the jagged white Nostraman text clashing with the red hue of the HUD. For once in his long life, he wants to not be in the air. He needs to be on the ground. At least, for now.

He remembers everything Adaric told him in the small stuffy situation room, the benefits of a close-to-eidetic memory, but one word stands out above all others. Reivers. Plural. A collective, a group, a unit. They undoubtedly outnumber him.

There is no doubt in Sahaal mind that that's who's shooting at him. Every part of his mind, the twinned mental gospels of combat training and veteran experience, tells him that he's fighting other Astartes. He recognises the sound of a bolt pistol discharging, and that's what he heard. He knows what it feels like to be shot by one too, and the overwhelming waves of pain coming from his chest is so very familiar.

So, with that in mind, he knows what to do. Forget counterattack. If he makes the next move, he'll be dead in minutes. He's already cut the thrusters on his back, and in those few precious seconds of freefall, he goes limp, or as limp as Legion warplate will allow.

With the crunch of pottery tiles and the snapping of wooden rafters, he falls through the roof of a house. More pain lances up his back, and Sahaal doesn't want to think about what this might do to the delicate machinery of his jump pack. The building's attic flashes past in an instant, and he only gets a small glimpse of jumbled shapes shrouded by dustcloths before he goes through the floor without slowing down.

A second later, and the next storey's floor arrests his fall. Floorboards splinter and snap upwards under his weight, but they hold. The impact redoubles the pain, and this time it's enough to make the Night Lord howl through his external address speakers. Every single inch of his genhanced body feels like it’s being stabbed with swords and torn with hooks.

Something in his suit's systems must have been damaged, either from the shot or in the fall, because it's ten solid seconds of immense agony before the autoinjectors kick in and pump his veins full of counter-pain chems and healing cocktails. He gasps in relief as the narcotic balm covers the pain. His faculties return to him, and with them his focus.

Acting quickly, he activates a small alteration to his armour's subsystems. Usually, the transponder on a set of Mark IV warplate broadcasts a select set of information constantly - Legion identification numbers, life signs, location and the like. With a bit of jury-rigging, Sahaal can edit that. He disconnects a couple of circuits to make it appear flickering and damaged, and sets the life sign readings to critical. With a few murmured mantras and mental commands, he slows his heart rate down as much as possible.

Then, he slumps back into the crater his landing created and does his best impression of a dead body.

* * *

Four minutes later, someone takes the bait. Standard Legiones Astartes protocol is to always confirm kills visually, and when the target has taken out three platoons worth of Imperial Guardsmen, that goes double. From his position on the floor, he feels rather than hears the cautious but heavy footsteps as whoever it is ascends the creaking staircase.

As he tightens his fingers around the worn synth-weave of his boltgun's grip, a ceramite boot smashes down the thin sheetwood door. It hits the ground with a ringing thump. The figure that steps across the threshold is just like the hololithic image that Sahaal saw that morning, but life size and animated. And unmistakably Astartes, despite the changes.

The newcomer's warplate is the polished cobalt blue of the old Thirteenth Legion, as was, and the Ultramarines chapter that sprung from their dissolution. A white curving horseshoe-esque rune marks his right pauldron, the venerable Ultima symbol. It's also an inverted version of the ancient Greikan Omega letter, the one he's seen in the Bar's library, but the warrior standing over him doesn't know that.

In his right hand, he holds a bolt pistol, a pattern with a longer barrel and casing than the Crusade-era ones Sahaal's used to. His left holds a short sword more reminiscent of a jungle world machete than any warrior's weapon. The helm of the Reiver is carved into the shape of a skull, white with glowing red vision-blocks for eyes. On each side of the false jaw, there is a circular emitter mounted, like a speaker but not a speaker. Black polymer-fabric ammunition pouches are strapped to both thighs, the tops of gunmetal grey magazines peeking out over the flaps.

There is a subtle wrongness to the Marine. The overlapping armour plating is more rounded and form-fitting than traditional marks. Gaps between them are filled by flexible ribbed material, thicker than that which protects the Raptor's joints.  The left pauldron is bigger than the right, to give an advantage in melee combat, he would guess. All of this adds up to a figure that is most definitely a Space Marine but at the same time a radical departure from the conventions of design that Sahaal is used to.

A few muted clicks come from between the carved teeth, evidence of a private vox-link. The Reiver's eye lenses look over Sahaal's prone form, searching for a mortal wound, or some evidence that the Chaos Space Marine in front of him is definitely dead. Behind his helm, his lips curl into a small grin.

Sahaal starts to raise his heart beat back to normal levels. At first, it's only his primary heart, the human one he was born with.

**_Ba-dump. Ba-dump._ **

That gets the Reiver's attention. The Ultramarine's autosenses start to pick up the heartbeat, the amplified audio booming in the loyalist's ears.

_**Ba-dump ba-dump. Ba-dump ba-dump.** _

His secondary heart, the smaller one that makes his vascular system not quite binary, joins in a second later. The beating is not that of wounded prey. It is strong, like a regiment's marching drums sending men off to war. By now, the bastard son of Guilliman is painfully aware that the Traitor Legionary in front of him is certainly not dead. A frantic series of clicks from his vox-grille is all that Sahaal hears of the calls to his squadmates, urgently warning them of the danger. He brings up his bolt pistol, the heavy handgun's gleaming barrel staring down at Sahaal.

He's fast, but Sahaal is faster. _Mordax Tenebrae_ jerks upwards, the ornate Tigrus-pattern bolter pointing up at the Reiver's chestplate. With his armoured thumb, he flicks the weapon's fire selector to full auto and holds down the trigger.

Most depictions of bolters in Imperial propaganda have them as similar to autoguns or Earth assault rifles, automatic death dealers that seal the fate of whatever their righteous master points the business end at. This is not strictly true. The death dealer part, most certainly, but not the operation. A boltgun is best thought of as a grenade launcher, firing rocket-propelled projectiles that explode upon contact or on a time delay. The same principles as gyrojets, but more effective. With ammunition like this, use is almost always strictly semi-automatic. Almost.

There exists the option for automatic fire on every weapon stamped out on a forge world or in a Chapter armoury, but it is seldom used. It damages the internal mechanisms, it warps the barrel, it wastes munitions that are costly in time and resources to make. It is more trouble than it's worth. Such a risky option only exists because of the inevitable reality of war. Last stands. Forlorn hopes. Tunnel fighting. Boarding actions. Battles in which you need all the help you can get.

Like, for example, having a Primaris Marine with the height advantage standing two feet away from you.

The stream of bolt shells hits the Reiver like a hurricane to the face. An entire thirty round magazine emptied in a few scant seconds. Out of those over two dozen rounds, most are not that powerful, especially not against the superior ceramite-plasteel alloys of the Ultramarine's armour. These are the shells Sahaal got from the Alpha Legion, Astartes quality but made in the modern era, with all the technical limitations that entails. These rounds crater and crack, they slam home and break up the upper layers of the warplate. Blood, bright red superoxygenated lifeblood, bubbles up through the blast-blackened rents.

On their own, those shells will not take down the Primaris Marine. They will only wound him and piss him off at best. But, like a ring fighter with steel plates in his gloves, Sahaal has more in his arsenal than he first appears to. One in five rounds is Legion-grade, a precious relic of better, more advanced times. Manstoppers, although that term is not quite accurate. There is little stopping involved, except of the target's life, and they work on so much more than just mere men.

These have more of an impact. They rip and tear through the protective aegis of the Reiver's modern mark just as well as when the same sort of micromissiles slaughtered loyalists at the Drop Site Massacre. One smashes into the carved skull, blowing away the right-hand sonic emitter with a banshee's screech of static. Cracks spiderweb out across the white-painted ceramite. Another catches in the oversized offhand pauldron, its detonation sending the Reiver stumbling back, knocked off guard for a split second. Three more lodge themselves in the warrior's lightly armoured midriff, the unfamiliar light armour doing almost nothing to impede the progress of the rounds.

For a moment, they stay like that, a trifecta of solid rounds embedded in the hard muscle of the Astartes' gut. Then, with three simultaneous wet thumps, they detonate.

The Reiver stumbles back, his belly torn open and gushing blood. He drops his short sword and clutches at the wounds, trying in vain to stem the bleeding. He fails, the injuries so bad that not even his enhanced biology can heal the damage. His knees give out, and he falls to the buckled wooden floor, blood seeping into the boards. All the while, his eye lenses are focused on their twins in Sahaal's helm, never looking away. Perhaps they are meant to be accusing. Sahaal doesn't care. He only watches.

The Reiver coughs, a wet hacking sound made all the more strange by the vox-corruption of the external address speakers. A hand goes out, the Ultramarine's vain attempt to steady himself. It doesn't help. He falls to the side, breathing his last through his helm's respirator unit and making the night air reek of sharp, coppery Astartes blood.

Sahaal stays lying on the floor for a few seconds as the flatline signal whines across the vox, his breathing heavy from the combat drugs and adrenaline cocktails pumped into his veins. Then, with a grunt of effort, he pushes himself out of the crater and stands up. A fresh magazine replaces the spent one, the action of reloading more rote than anything else. There is no time to waste.

The gunfire will have alerted the other Reivers. He will not be facing them at the Basilica. Their battle will be taking place here, on whichever miserable street this house is on.

He moves to the fresh corpse of his kill and kneels down. Deft, practiced fingers pick through pouches and satchels to find whatever bounty the dead warrior had on him. In the end, it is not much. Three cylindrical grenades marked with a blue starburst symbol are pulled from a bandolier mag-locked to his waist. An ankle sheath yields a pair of light flares, the fragile fuse-paper crumbling at Sahaal's ungentle touch. There is the bolt pistol, with its acid-etched maker’s mark of _'Cawl-Pattern Mk. 2. Sacred Mars',_ but Sahaal leaves it. He's never liked projectile weapons, and he's not going to start now. The only reason he has _Mordax Tenebrae_ is because that was a gift from his father, and he treasures it like he would any other object from him. It might be useful on the battlefield, but if it did not have its provenance, it would have been discarded long ago.

The short stabbing sword looks appealing to Sahaal's eyes, but he doesn't have the space for it, or the time needed to get used to its heft. If he survives the next few minutes, he'll come back for it. For now though, he leaves both weapons on the floor.

As he gets up and turns to leave through the hole in the roof, a howl resonates through the streets outside. Perhaps howl is the wrong word. It is a scream of rage and sorrow, a brother's mourning wail. It is a war cry, a warning to the enemy of the doom that approaches. It is a weapon made from wordless speech, but just as sharp as a blade. It is all of these things. It makes the flimsy walls shake and what glass left in the window frames shatter into hundreds of tiny shards.

Sahaal smiles. They aren't the only ones that can do that. Taking in a deep, blood-scented breath of air, he fills all three lungs to capacity, turns up the volume on his helm's vox to maximum and screams. Like the Reiver's call, it shakes the foundations of the buildings. Unlike the Reiver's call, there is no subtlety to it. It is a view halloa, a hunter's cry. It promises nothing but death and pain for his prey. Simple and straight to the point.

With a few blink-clicked runes on his heads-up display, Sahaal activates the twinned thrusters on his back once again. The brief interlude of grounding is over. Time to return to the skies again.

* * *

On a cloud of smoke and flame, the Night Lord rises up onto the roof of the house. A few fragments of tile are vibrated off as he passes, but he pays them no mind. Angling himself, he flies over the the cobbled street below, taking in the rain-flooded shell holes and the abandoned ground cars. His eyes scan over the road, looking for any trace of his enemy. As he lands, his hand grasping at chimney stack to steady himself on the slanted roof, he sees them.

The screen gives them away. One of them, a Marine wearing a skull-shaped face mask that leaves his eyes and scalp bare, has a small display unit built into his vambrace. The screen glows in the night, a sickly monochrome green that makes the puddles shimmer like oil and seemingly sharpens the lines of its wearer's warplate into a caricature.

His battle-brother is clad in identical armour to the Reiver Sahaal killed, but where the last one had a sword and pistol as his armament, this one has a bolter. Not a bolter that Sahaal has ever seen, but some strange modern variant, with a textured foregrip and a larger barrel bore. Both are standing in the middle of the street, almost like statues if not for the occasional twitch of a finger or hiss of a respirator unit.

As Sahaal watches, the partially helmed warrior stares at his screen, the light giving his eyes an unearthly glow. Then, with an unexpected violence, his head jerks up. His eyes lock on to the Night Lord's scarlet eye lenses, and something about his face hardens. He nods to Sahaal, and with a flurry of sign language sends his subordinate striding into a darkened passageway to flank.

The vambrace-mounted screen is dropped to his side. From a hip holster, a heavy pistol is pulled and pointed in Sahaal's general direction. He prepares to jump, to take to the sky again and start dodging shots like he was born to do it. But nothing comes, until the chimney stack reverberates with the clunk of an impact.

He peers round the fluted, smoke-blackened top, and sees an anchor-like shape embedded a full inch into the brickwork. Metal arms splay out like a flower's petals. A long length of high-tensile cable leads out and down into the darkness. Sahaal recognises the grapnel for what it is a heartbeat, and his eyes hurriedly follow the line's path back.

The Reiver sergeant has already begun ascending. His grapnel gun's motor pulls him up to the rooftop, the cable pulled back through the barrel hungrily. A short sword in his grip gleams in the moonlight.

Sahaal waits for a few long seconds that seem to drag out forever. Then, with his face set into a mask of focus, he slices at the cable with his claws. He has to be precise. Too little of a cut, and the sergeant will just continue on as he has, with a slight bump. Too much, and he'll be sent into the street below, to pick himself up and try again. It has to be just enough, just right.

In the end, he gets it right. He cuts halfway through the line, sending the sergeant swinging on a new path straight into the brick wall below. Whatever Sahaal thinks of these Primaris Marines, he has to admit that they're as tough, if not tougher, than the Astartes he's used to fighting. This will only slow him down. That might be all that he needs, though.

The Reiver smashes through the wall with enough force to rattle the roof and send the Raptor grasping for the chimney stack again. A muted groan of pain floats up from below him. Wasting no time, Sahaal steps back, and then jumps over the edge. For one sickening moment, there is only free fall. His ceramite-encased fingers grab at the iron half-cylinder of the guttering, and with that creaking and bending under his weight, he uses his momentum to swing through the new hole after the Ultramarine like he did at the vox post a seeming age ago.

Said warrior is picking himself up from the floor, his cobalt plate dusted with red powder and chunks of mortar. A vicious cut above his right eyebrow drips blood down his pale face. Ice blue eyes stare at Sahaal with fathomless hatred. He throws the useless grapnel gun into the corner and shifts into a fighting stance with his sword.

Sahaal re-energises his claws with relish. Blue-white lightning dances over the foot-long spurs of metal. The Ultramarine laughs, a sharp bark of grim humour, and Sahaal doesn't understand for a moment why. He doesn't usually have his prey laughing.

"Tell me, what is it you find so funny about your own impending doom, whoreson?"

"Everything, you foul traitor. Everything. I know not what you have attempted here, and I do not care. All of this, the strange daemon-dirges, the dozens of lives taken and all the effort you expended has come to naught. I swear upon my honour, I will kill you in this very room and have your head sent back to Ultramar as a trophy." He twirls his sword, a small act of vanity to emphasise his words. "I am Sergeant Marcus Flavainus, and it is I who am your doom."

Sahaal fights down the sudden, boiling anger that comes to the surface with the Reiver's taunts. "I've been fighting your brothers for longer than you've been alive. They couldn't kill me, and somehow, I don't think you will. My name is Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Eighth Legion and I'm looking forward to using that mask of yours as a toilet roll holder." He pauses, and then says: "And it's not a daemon-dirge. It's rock."

It is entirely possible that Sahaal has spent too much time in Milliways. He doesn't regret it, though. He also doesn't regret blink-clicking the music icon on his HUD and setting the fight that followed to Black Ice.

As the guitar riffs start up, the two leap at each other, blades out and aiming for their opponent's weak spots.

_"Well, the devil may care..."_

* * *

In the end, only one of them walks out, covered in a mixture of his own blood and his kills. Three helms hang from his belt. One is shattered by a bolt shell. One is spattered with its former owner's blood. One is a half-mask, covered with shrapnel scars and burnt from close contact with a light flare. A bundle of shock grenades fill a pouch next to them, the spoils chosen by the victor.

Sahaal heads back to Milliways, limping, in pain from a dozen slash wounds and two bolt shell impacts, and with his mind being slowly enveloped by the soporific haze of the painkilling narcotics in his blood. But, he's alive, and the three Ultramarines aren't. He'll take that as a victory.


	12. Glitter

As he comes around from his slumber, the first thing that Sahaal is aware of is a splitting headache. If you asked him at that moment, he would swear that there were tiny men with pneumatic mining drills boring into his head. As he opens his big black eyes, the darkness of the room seems somehow to spin. The desk and computer terminal blur into one another, and he feels like he's about to throw up. His throat is dry and parched, and he reaches for the canteen of water he keeps on his bedside table in an effort to soothe it. 

When he pulls his hand out from beneath the pillow, he can see tiny spots of light covering it. Sahaal rubs his aching eyes, and looks again. There's glitter all over his hand, and up his forearm, and, as he pulls his sleep shirt up, apparently the rest of his arm. 

He exhales heavily. He has no idea how this happened, but it's probably connected to his massive headache, the fact that he can't see any of his normal clothes and the traffic cone lying overturned in the middle of his floor.


	13. Tea

Apparently, some people on Earth like to call dinner 'tea'. Just why you would do that is not something Sahaal understands, because if you were going to come with a colloquialism for an evening meal, you could at least come up with something that didn't put him in mind of a tepid, milky drink. 

Or, Sahaal could come up with better thoughts to take his mind off the fact that his dinner tonight is not going to be very nice. 

In many ways, Milliways has spoiled him, and a prime example is the food. The 42nd Millennium cannot provide spaghetti carbonara or chicken tikka masala or spicy potato wedges. Those things are the province of Bar and Bar alone. It does have the bland fare that he keeps in his belt pouches for occasions like this one. 

Sahaal is high up in a hive manufactorum, tucked away in the shadowy recesses of the metal rafters. During the next work shift, a visiting dignitary from the local Ecclesiarchy, a cardinal of some renown, will come to bless the autocannons produced below before they go off to war. Baseless superstition, of course, but his death at the hands of an ancient traitor in the heart of one of the Imperium's worlds will be quite the blow to morale. But, that is in almost twelve hours, and all that Sahaal can do for now is wait and eat. 

From one of his larger pouches, he pulls out a pair of foil-wrapped ration bars and a hydration pack and sets them on the iron beam next to him. Then, carefully, he disengages his helm's environment seals with a hiss of escaping air. The skull-painted piece of armour goes into his lap, and Sahaal leans his head back against the support pillar he is sat against, feeling the cold metal through his unruly, tangled black hair. Smoky air wafts up from the furnaces below, mixed with the curses and shouting of the menials that operate them. Thankfully, the firelight does not reach the highest parts of the rafters, and so he can see with his own, unshielded eyes. Well, as long as he doesn't look down. 

Reluctantly, he reaches for his meal with a midnight blue gauntlet and begins trying his to imagine that the fare is anything else in the multiverse. It doesn't help. The ration bars are still a strange mix between crumbly and chewy, and taste of something Sahaal is reluctant to try to pinpoint. The hydration pack is not water, but some sort of electrolyte-enriched fluid that flows much too sluggishly down his throat and has a faint chemical aftertaste. Still though, it's better than nothing.


	14. Coffee

In some ways, Milliways is a very American establishment. The coffee is bad. Very bad. As far as Sahaal can see, the problem comes from the fact that the beans used in the filter coffee are substandard at best and probably shit out of a crow before being packaged up at worst. 

On the other hand, there's always a pot of burnt, stale, strong coffee sitting on a hot plate between the espresso machine and the spare bags of peanuts. It's more convenient to just pour himself a cup of what someone has labeled _'M.I.T Blend'_ and feel his taste buds melt away at the same time the insane amount of caffeine kicks in. 

He should start getting his own mugs, though. The poor souls that do the washing up are complaining about the stains on the ceramic. 


	15. Waffles

Apparently, waffles at breakfast are an Earth thing, so in the spirit of learning about the dominant culture in Milliways, Sahaal tries them. 

He's not impressed. Firstly, the strange cooked batter is much too crispy for his liking. The chocolate sauce Bar drizzled liberally over the top is not something he wants to consume at 07:30. Having sugar on top as well is making him want to run another few circuits around the lake to burn off of the calories. The worst offenders might be the strawberries and blueberries sprinkled on top, because fruit at breakfast just seems wrong to him. 

Sahaal tries to eat it, he really does. But, after five minutes of choking down bites, he gives up and orders his usual cooked breakfast.


	16. Kitten

_Scratch. Scratch. Scratch._

Sahaal's applying unguents to his bolter's ornate chambers as part of his daily maintenance rituals when he hears the sound. At first, for a few seconds, he thinks that one of his neighbours must be doing some work in their room, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's coming from his door. Curious, he puts down his half-disassembled bolter on the expanse of cloth that covers the carpet and goes to look through the peephole. 

The view of the hallway outside is brightly lit, as you would expect at half past two in the afternoon. Sahaal pans his keen eye over the tiny sliver of outside, trying to make out details through the low-quality glass. To his surprise, there's no one there. Bemused, he opens the door, one hand on his combat knife out of instinct and paranoia. 

For a second, Sahaal only sees the empty hallway. Then, he feels a small jab of pain from his bare foot and looks down. There, with one of its claws digging into his pale flesh, is a tiny feline with jet black fur looking directly into his goggles with its bright amber eyes. Ignoring the tiny beads of bright Astartes blood the claw draws from his foot, Sahaal picks the cat up by the scruff of its neck, heedless of the shrieking hiss and swiping talons it deploys. He brings it up to his eye level, and stares at the squirming furball with dispassion. 

A glint from around its neck attracts his attention, and he reaches for it. Sahaal's hand grabs a cold circle of metal attached by a battered ring itself connected to a leather collar. He brings the disc closer to his eyes, and peers at the engraved letters. 

_Return if found to Room 1075,_

_Milliways Bar_

_Who the fuck knows?_

He chuckles at the last line, and then carefully puts the still-kicking-off cat on the hallway carpet. 

"I don't care what you do. Just don't bother me anymore," he says. As the cat heads down the corridor with nary a backwards glance, Sahaal sighs. Why is he talking to a cat? 


	17. Future

A life flashes before his eyes. It isn't his.

* * *

_Fireworks burst overhead. Small starbursts of light fill the sky, coloured in all the hues of the rainbow and more. Music wafts through the open door back into the bar. It’s 21st century dance. Not Sahaal's sort of thing, so he tunes it out._

_As the sky seems to ignite, the Night Lord relaxes into his chair on the patio. A bottle of amasec sits in his pale hand. The December night is cold, but his genhanced body and the warmth of the alcohol burning down his throat lets him withstand it with ease._

_Behind him, the music gets quieter. In its stead, a chorus of voices takes over. They count down from five, shouting in all the accents of the multiverse. There's a cheer, and then:_

_**"Happy New Year!"** _

* * *

But it is. Sahaal can see himself in every snippet of memory, in armour, in duty robes, in training fatigues, in casual clothes. Bleeding. Covered in the blood of others.

* * *

_Life blood drips from his claws. Bodies lie piled around him. Human, mortal. Fragile. Broken at his hands. Imperial Guard, from the rank icons, talismans of faith and citation ribbons._

_Falling snow is beginning to cover them as he props the corpse of their commander up against the burning hulk of a Chimera APC. Sahaal tears away the man's flak armour, and with careful fingers plucks his unit patch off his greatcoat. It looks so small in his armoured gauntlet._

_It's a fairly simple regimental patch, an Imperial eagle sat on top of a human skull, with victory laurels beneath it. Above the emblem are the Gothic numerals '412'. Below it is a motto. 'Ex Ultionis Is Hii Post Mortem Nobis'._

_In the Cadian sub-dialect of High Gothic, that roughly translates to "Vengeance From Beyond the Grave"._

* * *

But it can't be. He doesn't recognise most of the places, and those he does are changed by time and wear. Trophies hang from his warplate Sahaal hasn't taken from enemies he doesn't know about. By the warp, there are foes in the visions that must come from a hundred different universes.

* * *

_Something is in the darkness. Something is coming out of the darkness. Something is the darkness._

_Most would be unable to conceive what is happening, just beyond the realm of human understanding. Sahaal is from the 42nd Millennium. He has seen daemons tear through reality, xenos contraptions that skirt the line between technology and magic and voyaged on ships through the impossible unrealms of the Warp. His understanding is slightly different to others._

_He can see the horror arising. Glimpses of dripping wet skin, tentacles where there should not be tentacles, great wings unfurling, and the eyes. The dying embers of stars in the galactic core, where such greatness of nature goes to die, shine in those pitiless orbs. It is not at its strongest, or most deadly, or even most fearsome, but it is the worst thing Sahaal has ever seen._

_Somehow, he finds his voice. "I name you dread Cthulhu, he who dreams no more!"_

* * *

He wants to hang on. He tries to, to keep hold of something of his awareness, but he can't, and he slips head-first into the full clairvoyance of the now.

Sahaal's conscious mind slips away, and only visions of an uncertain future remain.

* * *

_Music is about to start. It is anachronistic, a remnant of a long-forgotten past that shouldn't exist in this dark millennium. But, through Milliways, it now does._

_He's quite glad. If there's one thing that Sahaal's come to realise is truly terrible about his home universe, it is the music. Dry, orchestral overtures and stale military marches are not particularly inspiring. Certainly nothing to wage war to._

_Given what he's doing, there should be something more dramatic for him to do, or at least he feels there should be. A detonator trigger to pull, or button to depress. There isn't. Just an icon on his helm display to click, and static rushes from every vox-horn, public address speaker and hovering audio-drone. As one, the hive turns to their technology, confused and wondering._

_From where he is, high up in the hive city's spire districts, Sahaal can see the confusion turn to fear as every pict-screen suddenly cuts out, replacing the Imperial propaganda of the Civilian Worship networks with a single, burning rune. Every single citizen knows it, and he can practically feel the fear spreading like a virus. There, in front of their frightened eyes, is the eight-pointed star of the Chaos Gods. The Dread Pantheon. The Ruinous Powers. The Archenemy._

_As if that wasn't enough, the static cuts out, to be replaced with a new sound. Strange melodies cut across the vox-channels, with words that make little sense to those that hear them. They don't need to comprehend. Sahaal just needs them to understand the omens he's putting in front of them, like the galaxy's most transparent soothsayer._

"Please allow me to introduce myself,

I'm a man of wealth and taste..."

_Everything about that last sentence is wrong. He's not quite a man. He certainly isn't wealthy. And, as always, taste is relative. Very few of the people he knows would like his preferred music, food or literature._

_Sahaal shrugs as best he can in full warplate. That doesn't stop the song from being perfect for the occasion._

* * *

_Around him, a hemisphere burns. Firestorms rage across the surface of the agri-world, consuming everything in their path. He stands on the cracked rockcrete of the planet's one starport, looking up._

_Far above him, strike cruisers and battle barges rain down death and destruction. Like vengeful gods of the void, everything they can target with their lance arrays and bombardment cannons turns to ash and smoke. Towns and farming communes cease to exist as macrocannon shells reduce them to scorched craters. Those blazes sweep through hundreds of kilometres of crops and forests, feeding the flames with all the fuel they could ever need. Beneath his feet, Sahaal can feel the tremors as munitions the size of a hab-block shake the earth. He's seen the results of barrages like this. Soon enough, the very planet will wither under the assault. Tectonic fault lines will rupture. A world will die._

_Even as he stands there, surrounded by the wreckage of void-capable craft and those who could pilot them, he doesn't feel in danger. All the fire is giving the starport a wide berth, for one simple reason._

_He is here. He, First Captain Zso Sahaal, is standing in the eye of an apocalyptic hellstorm, and his presence is stopping it from reaching its full potential. Not due to any power of his, unfortunately._

_It is due to the power of the monster screaming his name into every vox-channel._

* * *

_Mortals with hope in their eyes are rare in the 42nd Millennium. Rarer still are those who look at Sahaal and feel hope._

_He is the first to admit that he looks like a monster. That is intentional. If he looked like anything else, he would be a piss-poor Night Lord. Painted lightning crackles across his ancient midnight blue warplate. Scarlet vision-blocks burn like glowing coals from his faceplate, itself painted with a bone-white skull. The icon of his beloved Legion is displayed with pride on his right pauldron, a daemonic bat-winged skull staring out at the world with dead eye sockets. A tangle of trophy bones taken from a beast that does not exist in his universe hang from his belt, inscribed with curving Nostraman runes. Across his chestplate, there is a deep, scorched gouge from the same creature's burning whip, the mostly cosmetic damage impossible to truly remove. His claws and bolter and knife and grenades are not the holy instruments of protection they are in the hands of loyalist Space Marines, but rather tools of terror and death._

_This is what she sees when she comes out of the stasis cell, her eyes bloodshot and her face hollow. And she smiles. It takes a certain person to take solace at the sight of him, and a certain set of circumstances._

_A prisoner held for almost two hundred years, most of that in suspended animation, by the Imperial Inquisition, ticks both boxes._

_Sahaal holds out his gauntlet. "We need to go."_

* * *

_For a moment, he hesitates, his hand on the lever. Not out of any internal conflict, or a desire to avert bloodshed. Sahaal made his mind up when he boarded. He only wants to savour the moment._

_His eyes flick to the small rectangle of plexiglass, in which is framed the entirety of the vast hangar bay. Through it, he can see everything. The crates of supplies stacked in the corners. Lighters being refueled from massive steel tanks plastered with warning notices. Innumerable menials and servitors hurry about the cavernous space, tending to runebanks and cleaning bulkheads and fetching cargo._

_He takes it all in, and then pulls the great brass lever._

_Immediately, alarms blare out. Vox-channels flood with automated announcements. Alert-lights strobe in their wall niches. Those down in the bay, those not lobotomised servant cyborgs at least, look up from their toil with the innate fear of the voidfarer. Every soul who has ever stepped foot on a starship or crewed an installation in the black skies knows those wailings. Decompression sirens._

* * *

_The city burns tonight. And, why wouldn't it? It certainly has reason to, more than most that have gone up in smoke across the years and universes._

_For one, there is the swarming army of the depths that comes up to kill and main. A seemingly endless tide of humanoid rodents, flea-bitten and rag-clothed, with murder in their hearts. They bring with them crude incendiaries tucked into their belts and clutched in their dirty claws, and the reckless abandon with which they use them._

_There is also the simple fact that it is a medieval-level society. Lanterns, tallow candles, torches. All plentiful. Add to that the wooden houses, and the massive amount of flammable materials literally everywhere you could care to look, and there is all the makings of a kilometres-wide tinderbox._

_Of course, there is also the Night Lord fighting the invasion. His flamer isn't exactly minimising collateral damage._

* * *

He doesn't know how long it takes for the precognition to stop, but it does, receding like a wave from his mind. Already, even before he's fully conscious, he can feel the details of the visions slipping away from him, leaving only impressions and fragments.

Sahaal comes to sitting in Milliways, on one of the bar stools, his body slumped up against the wooden surface of Bar. Every muscle in his genhanced body aches, like he's been exercising for days on end. There's something wet on his cheek, and as he pulls himself upright, he realises that he's been drooling. Luckily, his Betcher's Gland wasn't active, or the pool his face has been resting in would have been highly corrosive acid.

"That must have been a potent one. Jesus, you were really out of it."

On instinct, his arm snaps out towards the voice. His fingers wrap around a throat, and the speaker chokes, struggling for breath. Sahaal turns his head, whipping tangled hair out of his goggled eyes.

Clutched in his fist is a pale, skinny, shaven-headed man, dressed in a sports jacket and wearing a pair of tinted eyeglasses. A lho-stick, or a cigarette as they call it here, is dangling from his lips in a holder. Sahaal drops him, and he goes sprawling to the carpeted floor.

"Fuck," the man says as he picks himself up, "I didn't realise you'd take it that badly. Don't worry, they aren't permanent." He pauses. "I think."

"What the warpshitting hell was that?"

"A Yuggoth mushroom. I think they're from China or somewhere like that out East. Good shit, aren't they?"

Sahaal doesn't understand what he's hearing. Not a word of it. "Who are you, then?"

The man smiles, a broad toothy grin around his cigarette. "Jesus, don't you remember? Eh, that's okay, you were pretty out of it. I've had a lot of names. Some better than others. Call me Dr. Lono, I'm a writer. You heard of Rolling Stone?"


	18. Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written for Twelve Days of Christmas at Milliways Bar, Dreamwidth, December 2017

Apparently, you put baubles on Christmas trees. Tinsel, baubles and a star, that's what the book in the library said.

He's never heard of tinsel before, and he doesn't have a small stylised representation of a void-borne ball of gas. So Sahaal's dug out some baubles from the depths of his room, to use as his contribution to the Christmas tree. He comes down the stairs from his room early in the morning, carrying a worn musette bag under his arm.

The tree is a real one, brought in from outside to fill the air with the scent of pine needles and bark. Someone has already decorated it, stringing multi-coloured lights around the boughs and winding lengths of shiny material he assumes is tinsel around the trunk. Combined with the fireplace gently roaring away, the dim, low-key lighting of the wall lamps and the holly wreaths on every door, the bar feels very festive. Or at least, it would if Sahaal had a concept of festive.

He walks over, placing the bag on a nearby armchair. Carefully, he opens the worn cloth flap, emblazoned with the black letters _'U.S Army Air Force'_ , to reveal his decorations. His hand reaches in, and pulls out an autogun shell casing, the brass gleaming in the firelight. A hole has been drilled through the top of it and a cord run through, as Sahaal has with most of the other items in the bag. On the bottom, there is a small line of imprinted text circling the indentation left by the firing pin.

**7.62mm - DM - CRSNXXXIII**

* * *

_Smoke fills the air. It comes from the tapestries on the walls, ignited by flamer units and slowly turning to ash on the wind. It comes from the embers of incendiary grenades, their shrapnel pitting the cratered, blackened stone. It comes from the burning city outside, wood smoke blowing through the empty window frames._

_Most of all, though, the smoke carries the sweet scent of fyceline and cordite, curling as it does from the cooling gun barrels of the 33rd Coralisan._

_Sahaal looks on at the corpses of fifty men and women slumped behind a crude barricade of sandbags and repurposed desks. In front of them, nearly twice that number of enemy dead are sprawled over the floor of this city's administration hall. Most of them still clutch rifles as well, of poorer local manufacture._

_Sahaal's throat tenses, and something in his eyes hardens. He knows these dead. If not by name, then by face, from watching drills on the training grounds deep within the_ Umbrea Insidior _. Others he knows from banquets put on by the command elements of the Expeditionary Fleet, over his past decade of service. He recognises majors, captains, lieutenants, a smattering of sergeants. All once soldiers in the service of the Imperium, proud Army troopers. No longer._

_Their faces have slackened in death, and their once-khaki tunics have been so soaked in their blood that it seems that they had always been dyed a dried sickening brown. A sea of brass surrounds them, dotted with the small grey islands of empty magazines. Someone in the unit has hung the regimental colours from a column, the tattered battle flag still flapping in the wind. Despite the destruction, there is a small twinge of pride in his metaphorical heart. There are very few better ways for soldiers to die._

_He knows there is protocol to follow. Imperial bodies are not left on the battlefield for the carrion crows. As soon as his vox-transmission reaches the warzone's command echelon, then a series of events kick off. Funerary arrangements are made, body bags dispatched and pre-dug grave plots allocated. Reports will be auto-transcribed and archived into great stacks, not to see the light of day for decades, perhaps centuries. Citations will be written up, medals despatched on courier ships to next of kin on Coralis. There will be account written, poems penned, so formulaic Sahaal can hear them now. The glorious last stand of the Thirty-Third, heroes to a man._

_But, that is in the future. Right here, right now, as Sahaal looks on, he doesn't see heroes. He sees soldiers at rest, finally. His ceramite-encased fist slams against his chestplate, the echo ringing through the vaulted hall as he gives the old Terran salute._

_Then, he blink-clicks one of the items on his retinal display and opens a vox-channel. All the time he is speaking, his eyes never leave the 33rd._

* * *

Sahaal sets the shell casing aside, the dull cylinder of brass laid with care on the plush arm of the chair. He reaches into the bag, and pulls out another item. This time, there was no need to drill a hole through it, because its makers had kindly provided one for him.

* * *

_"I'm surprised, traitor."_

_The Dark Angel stands like a knight at rest, sword pointed towards the scorched deck of the hangar bay. Both his gauntleted hands are wrapped around the pommel, the black ceramite in contrast with the rich red silk of the handle's wrappings. He goes unhelmed, his long ash-blond hair blowing in the breeze created by the air circulation units. Trinkets hang from his belt, symbols of loyalty and heritage mixed in with small battle trophies. His eyes squint into the pitch blackness, trying to pierce the gloom beyond the thin halo of light cast by his suit's shoulder lamp._

_Sahaal stands across from him, his midnight blue warplate blending into the darkness. Lightning crackles across his claws, the foot-long lengths of superconductive metal humming with power and suppressed bloodlust. The bay is cold as well as dark, one step up from the open void, and the idling thrusters on his bank provide the only faint heat. "Why ever would you say that, little Angel?"_

_Small puffs of vapour accompany the Dark Angel's reply. "Because you are a Night Lord, Captain Sahaal. Because you are an honourless, motherless bastard who doesn't have a shred of decency in his body." He laughs, a small bitter bark of humour. "From all that I have heard, I can scarcely believe you would duel me in the traditional manner."_

_Sahaal chuckles back, his lips twisted behind his helm into a sardonic grin. "You heard correctly." With that, he activates the two thrusters on his back, leaping into the frigid air. A shouted Calibanite curse follows him up into the steel ribcage of the rafters. His fingers grab hold of one of the thick girders and he anchors himself in place, leaning back and looking back down to the deck below._

_His tongue depresses the external address stud twice, sending two quick bursts of static across a pre-selected vox-channel. The Dark Angel, for all his pride, is right. No Night Lord would even consider an honourable, fair fight._

_One of the grated deckplating sections slides up and out of its brackets silently, the battered runnels oiled especially for this moment. From the maintenance crawlspace below, a midnight blue figure unfolds, the dull gunmetal slab of a bolt pistol in his hand. There is no hesitation._

_Two bolt shells rocket into the loyalist, one to the back of each lightly armoured kneecap. He goes down roaring, more from rage than the pain of the shattered joints. More Night Lords emerge from the gloom of the hangar's corners. A pair come from behind the solid steel mass of a wall stanchion, their Nostraman chainglaves whirring in anticipation. From where he is on his hands and knees, the Angel has no chance. He still tries, Sahaal will give him that, and he gets off a few conservative swings of his sword. That's all._

_The glave-wielders, Nadrak and Lothar, follow his orders for once. Lothar slices into the fibre-bundles of the Angel's wrist, making him drop his sword in an involuntary twitch of dying machinery. Nadrak holds his chainglave to the loyalist's throat, stopping any further resistance in its tracks._

_Sahaal drops from the rafters, his boots clanging on the deck. He walks over to the I Legion champion, and kneels at his eye level. "Like I said. You heard correctly." The loyalist's eyes barely have time to go wide before Sahaal decapitates him with a single swipe of his claws._

_The last thing he hears is the mocking laugher of the four Raptors._

* * *

Sahaal turns the icon over in his hand. It's a small thing really, a winged sword cast in metal, the symbol of the Dark Angels Legion. He has threaded a new chain through the hole on the miniature pommel, the previous one having broken when he tore it from the champion's armour.

Both the icon and the shell casing are hung on the tree, from branches about his chest level. The next item is not so easy to find a place for.

* * *

_As far as fortifications Sahaal's assaulted in his long service to the Eighth Legion, the Imperial Palace is definitely the most beautiful. Wide, high galleries with ornate columns and frescoed ceilings serve as killing grounds. Rich red Astartes lifeblood is spilt across gold-flecked marble floors. Statues of war heroes look down aquiline noses onto the dead and the living alike, judging in their own inscrutable way._

_Sahaal turns at the sound of running footsteps. He's kneeling over a pair of Imperial Fists, pullings ammunition and supplies from their armour. Even as relatively close as the Raptors are to the outer walls, the fighting is as thick and heavy as he's ever seen it. The idea of supply lines here is a joke, and an unfunny one at that._

_Behind him, Sal Gosg of his command unit skids on the cracked marble and comes to a stop. "Captain, we have to go. Now."_

_Sahaal stands up and looks him in the eye lenses. "Why? New orders?"_

_"No." In that one syllable, Sahaal hears something completely new to him. An Astartes' voice wavering. Not quite fear, but as damned close as Sal Gosg can get. "I don't think we're going to be getting any more orders for a while."_

_He can live without orders, no problem. But, right then, something deep down in Sahaal's gut hardens. Instinctively, he knows that something is very, very wrong. "What do you mean?"_

_"Lothar picked up a vox-channel, over in the other hall. It's the Sixteenth, Captain, they're screaming into the airwaves. They're saying the Warmaster is dead."_

_Sahaal shakes his head. The Warmaster, dead? The idea that you could kill Horus Lupercal, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, general in human history and the architect of the Rebellion is laughable. You might as well try and extinguish a star or create an orkoid diplomat. It's impossible._

_But, as he tunes his helm's vox, the impossible is made reality. True to Sal Gosg's word, all of the Sixteenth Legion's channels are filled with weeping and wailing. A thousand hardened transhuman veterans, all mourning with one voice. He can hear officers he knows, men who have judged the fate of planets and razed civilisations to ash on the wind breaking down in his ears. Mostly, it is garbled gibberish, words reduced to meaningless jumbles of sound forced out through choked-up throats. Some of it, however, is more than audible._

**"...our father, our father, our father..."**

**"...no! He is lost! We are lost..."**

**"...this is Lieutenant Nevarseran, I can confirm. Lupercal is... is. He is fallen, may the Powers have mercy..."**

**"...who did this, lord, who did this to you..."**

**"...damn the Emperor to a thousand hells for this..."**

_Slowly, Sahaal pulls off his helm, silencing the cacophony of voices. His black eyes glint in the faint light. He walks over to the nearest statue, a granite effigy of some regimental commander from Feal's World, her chest adorned with stone medals and carved citations. Without a word, he smashes his armoured fist into the statue's leg._

_That strike is followed by another, and another, and another, and another, and another. Chunks of granite fly off, smashing against the marble floor tiles. Splinters slice his bare pale face, and blood streams down his face. He ignores it, and keeps punching. All his frustration, all his pent-up anger, all the memories of the comrades and brothers that have fallen for Horus and his rebellion, it all gets channelled into his balled-up fists._

_He hears a scream of rage coming from somewhere nearby, and it takes him a second, in his anger, to figure out that it's him that's making it. A red haze descends over him, and his vision narrows. Only his fists and the stone under them remain in the entire universe. All of this. All the struggle, all the battles, all the death and despair that he and his Raptors endured because it was told to them that they could bring about a better Imperium. All for nought._

_He knows, even through the anger. This was their one shot, and they threw it away. There will never be another. They have failed. Now all that remains is to find out what failure, and more importantly, fate, has in store for them._

_Sahaal stops punching, and he drops his fists to his side. His fingers loosen. White stone dust drizzles from the ceramite. He loosens. He turns back to Sal Gosg._

_"Order a full retreat. Now. I want every single Raptor still breathing back aboard the_ Umbrea Insidior _as soon as possible. I don't care what targets they think they have, we're pulling out."_

_"Captain?"_

_Then, Sahaal says the words that make all of this final in his mind. "We're quitting Terra, Sal. It's over. We lost. All that's left is to pick up the pieces."_

* * *

He doesn't know where he can put this decoration. A fist-sized chunk of granite, a service medal still visible on the time-blurred stone, rests in his hand. Cracks spiderweb across its surface, testament to the force that he hit it with all those centuries ago. Like most of the rest of his baubles, he has drilled a hole in the middle of it, and strung a thick loop of cord through it.

It's much heavier than its size would suggest, and he places it on a few different branches before he finds one strong and thick enough to hold it. With the piece of statue placed, he turns back to the bag. The next trinket Sahaal picks out is also the first on his list not of human manufacture.

* * *

_One of the sniper's shots finally hits him, and in a way, he's glad. It means Sahaal finally knows what he's up against._

_It strikes his left pauldron, and a swarm of angry red impact warning runes flash up on his helm display. He blinks them away, and glances down. A deep, thin furrow has been gouged across the midnight ceramite, taking with it a couple of painted-on unit citations. He'll need to paint them back on tonight, after he repairs the plate itself._

_The shot was from a las-weapon, he can tell from the scorch marks, but he knew that already. It's hard to miss blue bolts of light searing through the low-hanging mist. It is the tight width of the scar, and the fact that it's cut through at least three layers of armour that lets Sahaal know what it came from. An Imperial Guard weapon, with its crude vat-grown focusing crystal arrays, would have have barely scratched the paint._

_No. This is eldar work. Only they have laser weaponry powerful enough to cut like this. Behind his helm, Sahaal smiles. He hasn't fought eldar since Equixus, and after that? He feels he's due some revenge._

_The only downside is that he'll have to use his bolter. Eldar snipers are too elusive for even his claws, and trying to get much closer will only get him shot through the eye. Even going from tree to tree like he did when he hunted down Guide would be risky. Ranged is the only way Sahaal can approach this._

_He pulls his bolter from its mag-lock and readies, the familiar weight settling into his hands. With a flick of his thumb, Sahaal clicks the safety catch off. Carefully, he pokes out the skull-mouthed barrel and fires off a shell. A second later, and the dull crump of a detonation bounces off the densely packed trees. The eldar sniper is quick to respond, a las-bolt through the trunk so close to his head his helm systems note the temperature spike._

_There is no way that wasn't intentional, and somehow, that makes it worse. Not only is he being toyed with, but that this xenos thinks that he can be toyed with and that Sahaal is that weak as to let him. He snarls. Time to kick it up a notch, as they say on Earth television._

_A Primaris-issue shock grenade goes out first, the fist-sized cylinder landing by the sniper's perch. Blinding white light explodes out from it, accompanied by a burst of deafening, raucous noise. Two more explosives follow, a smoke canister and a frag grenade in quick succession. White phosphorus haze hisses out into the warm air, covering the forest floor with a low-hanging chemical fog. It forms a barrier nigh impenetrable to normal eyes, and Sahaal has to use his preysight to see the frag grenade go off._

_It does so spectacularly. The miniature explosive detonates against the trunk, breaking into the bark with a hundred shrapnel saws. With a creak of splintered wood, the tree topples, taking with it the eldar sniper's perch. Swiftly, Sahaal whips round the trunk, his bolter up and the targeting reticules searching for his prey._

_Almost immediately, he sets eyes on the sniper. The tree is falling fast, but he catches a few impressions before it hits the ground. Long thin limbs flailing against gravity, nimble fingers grasping for anything to arrest its fall. A hooded cloak, the same dull green as the forest canopy, gemstones woven into the fabric glittering in the light. Violet pinprick eyes staring at him from shadowed sockets, the hatred in them focused on him and him alone._

_Then the tree falls below the smoke, and takes it out of sight. Sahaal grins. Now the hunt begins._

_He swings out from behind the trunk, and with a jump pack-aided bound, leaps into one of the more venerable trees. The branches below him shudder, but hold. Looking down from his new perch, Sahaal watches as the sniper rolls with the fall and starts running north, its alien long rifle cradled in his arms. The Night Lord follows eagerly, going from treetop to treetop like a primitive ape with a pair of thrusters._

_Leaves cascade down to the ground under his weight. The roar of the twin turbines cuts through the air like nothing before it, silencing any natural sound. Every few seconds, Sahaal fires off a shot from his bolter, an enticement to the xenos to keep running. Most miss, cratering the soft dirt around his prey's feet. A couple hit, one tearing a hole in the lavish cloak, one glancing off whatever armour is concealed under it with enough force that it leaves the sniper's left arm hanging limply by its side._

_Sahaal's focus on the hunt is total, so when the trees run out and he finds himself at the edge of a small clearing, he almost falls. Gasping in surprise, he quickly jams his foot-claws into the thick bark to steady himself. The gap in the forest below is not a natural one. What looks like some sort of ruined structure of white alien stone stands in it, long left to the weeds and moss that now cover it. Most of it has collapsed into rubble hidden beneath the long grass, but one or two of the walls still stand, framing a freestanding arch that provides the clearing's centrepiece._

_He activates his preysight again, and the world dissolves into the deep blues and bright orange and yellow shades of thermal vision. His head pans around the area, looking for heat signatures. There, by one of larger wall chunks, he sees a patch of shimmering red. With a blink, he deactivates the specialised lenses. Sahaal's world becomes high-contrast colour once again, and he looks again at the spot._

_The preysight did not lie. A corner of the eldar's cloak pools out from behind the stone, the fabric a few shades of green too rich to be natural. Something unpleasant glitters in the Night Lord's black eyes. He draws his bolter for the second time today, and with a stroke of the trigger, he fires._

_A shell smashes against the stone, driving the sniper from its temporary haven. It rolls into cover behind a broken pillar, and Sahaal's shells follow it. Usually, he wouldn't consider using his bolter in a situation like this, for why would he kill with a firearm when he could deploy the sharp purity of his blades? But, he is enjoying the role reversal in truth, firing down at a near-helpless target. Let the alien have a taste of its own tactics._

_More shots break off ragged chunks from the pillar, and the sniper jerks from its hiding spot again. This time, Sahaal gives it no respite. As soon as it is out of sight, his grenades make it dash for the open. In this way he establishes a pattern. The sniper scuttles into shelter. He forces it out. Rinse. Repeat._

_This goes on what feels like a few seconds, in the heat of the hunt, but what is according to his helm's chrono two and a half minutes. An eternity in a firefight. He sighs. Perhaps this might have to end soon. A shame, in his opinion, become this game of cat and mouse is quite fun. But, all good things must come to an end._

_Reluctantly, he pulls out a pair of frag grenades and tosses them behind the windworn boulder the eldar is currently cowering against. They go off simultaneously, sending a ball of fire and shrapnel into the air. As soon as the sniper runs out into the open, bleeding and trailing smoke from its cloak, Sahaal draws a bead on it with his bolter and fires._

_He misses. At the last second, the xenos dodges to the side, letting the bolt shell carve a divot in the earth. Sahaal curses in ugly Nostraman and aims again, but it slides behind the central arch. As he looks on, trying to calculate the best angle to get the bastard from, a small spark appears in the centre of the arch._

_A sound like a whip-crack sounds through the clearing, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. More sparks flare into existence in the arch, the embers of some dying fire being relit and given new life. They pull together, forming a ball of light bright enough that Sahaal's already powerful flare-buffers dim even further to compensate. The ball expands, crackling with sorcerous purplish-blue energy, into a round, roiling portal, three meters by two in the middle of the bone-like arch._

_Sahaal recognises it immediately. The arch must be an eldar transportation gateway, one of their strange devices halfway between magic and technology. He's seen them before, on Equixus, on Praetoria and on half a dozen other worlds. Urgency plucks at his mind, overriding everything else. He can't let the sniper escape._

_In an instant, he launches himself from the tree and hits the ground, rolling into a run without a pause. His feet crush down the long grass as he sprints towards the arch, his breath ragged in his ears. The thin mist parts around his armoured form. Sahaal's world narrows again, his perception akin to optics focused on the gateway._

_A flash of green on white, and he jerks his head towards it. The sniper darts out from behind the curving length of stone, its cloak flowing behind it. It stops an inch from the portal, and looks back at Sahaal's charging figure with a mix of arrogance and amusement on its elfin face. A delicate artist's hand reaches for a bag at its waist, and places it on a broken chunk of wall to its side. Then, with a flourish and the furious Night Lord only feet away, it turns and steps through to safety._

_The portal snaps shut behind it with a burp of crackling ozone. Sahaal skids to a stop an arm's length for the now dead arch. A stream of curses come from his vox-grille, an indelicate mix of Imperial Low and High Gothic, Nostraman, Eighth Legion war-cant, Bar-standard English, the primitive prison-slang of his birth and a dozen other tongues. He leans his head back and roars, the static-laced howl of a hunter denied his prey. His balled-up hand pounds against the bone-like stonework of the gateway, but to no avail. Whatever it is made of is tougher than his gene-forged fist, and he is denied even that little satisfaction._

_Sahaal steps back and tries to force down his anger. He opens up his helm's external vents, letting crisp forest air flow in. He takes a deep breath, and another, and another, until his choler subsides. Finally, when he feels like he isn't going to explode with rage, he reaches over and picks up the bag the sniper left._

_It is a small pouch, made of some sort of soft cobalt velvet and sealed with an ornate bronze clasp. His armoured fingers unseal it, and tip the contents onto the chunk of stone. A tiny icon, shaped like an eldar rune, and a tube of paper tied with twine fall out. Carefully, Sahaal cuts the knot with his combat knife and unrolls the paper._

_It is a message. That much is clear, but for a few long moments, he can't read it. As he stares at it, racking his brain for any clue as to what it could be written in, he recognises one of the words. Talonmaster. His title, scribed in some dialect of High Gothic he does not know. Sahaal, armed with this knowledge, moves his finger along the spidery letters, looking for the inevitable traces of human tongues he knows._

_This is what spending ten thousand years in the Warp has done to him. Languages and parlances have sprung up, evolved on the lips on men and women who died long after he was lost, and died themselves, their linguistic remnants absorbed into other dialects to begin the cycle anew. So it goes, on into infinity. Whatever the sniper wrote in is a creation of one of these cycles, familiar but far removed._

_Sahaal traces along the words with his finger, mouthing the syllables behind his helm in some absurd parody of a small child learning to read. Slowly, he gets the gist of it. This is what he thinks it says:_

"You may be able to fight time and space, Talonmaster, but you cannot fight fate. Ulthwé will not be denied its vengeance."

_He laughs, and crumples up the paper. Let them try._

* * *

The paper he left at the ruins to wash away in the next rain. The message tube he filled with fyceline putty and used as a crude grenade back in mid-November. The rune, however, is hung between a pair of plastic pine cones.

For something only the size of a poker chip, it is surprisingly detailed. A stylised eye made of blocky lines and thin curves carved from some feather-light alien material weeping a single pearl tear. The cord of black silk that hangs through the abstract iris leads Sahaal to believe that it must have been some sort of wearable charm before he got his hands on it. Regardless, now it's a Christmas tree ornament.

Sahaal steps back and looks at his four additions. They might not be typical, but they're his and they're what he has to offer. His line of work, his life even, does not lend itself to collecting showy trinkets and decorations. War trophies will have to do. Perhaps that's what the book meant, that those celebrating should hang objects with memories behind them.

He's still not sure what all the little multi-coloured balls of metal and ceramic are in aid of though.


	19. Young

A cockroach goes crunch under his rag-wrapped foot, but he barely notices. The room, for a lack of a better term, is a few cracked ferrocrete slabs arranged by an earthquake into a small alcove, perhaps two meters by five. The boy had heard about it from another denizen of this lightless realm, a man two decades older than him, but who spoke like a small child wanting its mother when his hamstrings were sliced by the boy's shiv. 

Supposedly, it was someone's stash, a place for a man or a woman to hide their scavenged  prizes away from prying eyes. It had certainly worked so far, even if it was just the remoteness of the cache that protected it. The boy has had to crawl through kilometers of twisting caverns to get here, all in the dead zone between two main chambers of the prison-sink. Hard work for anyone, but the boy's muscles ache much more than an adult's would. 

Brushing tangled dark hair out of his pale face, he sees a trio of battered metal crates, all sealed, with a strange lightning bolt icon on them. He gives it no more thought as he plunders, eager to find something, anything, to stave off death for another day. 


	20. Old

The banner is old, so very, very old. It certainly looks it, with its tattered threads worn by time and torn by bullets. It smells it, the scent of mothballs and simple age impregnating both it and the air around it. Even its pole of carved Terran oak has suffered from the ages, left splintered and rotten by moisture. 

None of that is what tells Sahaal this flag's age. He sees what no one else in the wider multiverse can see; the names of battles woven into the midnight blue fabric in scarlet thread, engagements from ten thousand years ago he remembers like they were last night. Even here in his home universe, few can recall the victories it records. There are delicately embroidered campaign ribbons from the Great Crusade, earned in Eighth Legion blood before the coming of Konrad Curze. With Sahaal's genhanced eyes, he can see where tears and rips were repaired by Legion serfs who died millennia past, leaving only the thread used behind to mark their lives and work. 

With careful fingers, he pulls it from the socket behind the command throne. Around him, the cruiser's bridge burns, the air filling with the noxious scent of roasting plastek and charred wiring bundles. Firelight provides the only illumination. This is a Night Lords vessel, after all, no son of Curze needs electro-candles or glow-globes to light his way in the darkness. 

Not quite a battle trophy. It has always been his in a way, his Legion, his service. Taking the banner feels more like a retrieval, as if Sahaal is pulling one of his possessions from a vault. 

He clutches it in one hand, halfway up its pole. As the frigate burns around him, he walks out to the door back to Milliways. Better that he have it, and no other eyes look upon it, than one of Krieg Acerbus's maniacs keep it as his personal standard. 

 


	21. Security

Security. One word, written in block capitals that used to be white but have faded and dirtied into a greyish hue. One word, emblazoned on the ragged shirt that wraps around a desiccated corpse strapped to a container in the middle of these strange dunes.

Sahaal stares into the empty eye sockets of the dead man. It's clear what the locals think of security.

The container is a faded freight holder, made of thin, rusting metal still flecked with blue paint. It sits on the burning sand, next to a firepit full of charred debris, the corroded hulk of an ancient groundcar and a pair of dead bodies. A pair of what used to be scavengers, who had got the idea to try and rush him with their brittle knives and a pump-action shotgun. Now, one was slumped against the container, his guts spilling out onto the ground. The other's head looks up to the clear blue sky with glassy, sightless eyes, his body crumpled five feet away.

Sahaal has already checked the small camp. There is nothing of any value or importance, and he's starting to walk back to the door to Milliways when a warning rune chimes in his helm. His eyes follow the direction marker to a ridge of windworn rock, a few miles east of him. Light flashes from the top, and for a second, Sahaal thinks it's gunfire. His instincts take over and he drops to the sand, armour servos whining in protest.

He lies there for what seems to his adrenaline-flooded mind like forever, but what the chronometer in his plate tells him is only two and a half minutes. There are no solid-state rounds flying at him, no las-blasts to scorch the air. Slowly, he raises his head, his black eyes peering through scarlet eyeslits at the horizon.

The flashes aren't gunfire, and he mentally chides himself for thinking they were. Instead, what he's looking it is sunlight, glinting off something shiny and reflective. Sahaal picks himself up from the desert floor, dusting sand off his armour. Whatever this is, it has his attention. He starts walking towards the flashes, his boots leaving treadmarked craters behind him.


	22. Tending

A disused elevator car hanging like a gibbeted corpse in an abandoned lift shaft is not the best place to treat a wound, but it's all Sahaal has.

He stumbles through the rusted doors, pausing only to slam them shut behind him. Inside, he can barely fit into the six by eight box, so he sits himself on the worn rubberised floor, wincing in pain as he does so. Clearly, this lift was meant for much smaller users than a Night Lord.

He gets to work quickly. Using a small screwdriver-like tool, he removes his thigh plate, setting the blood-covered ceramite beside him. Underneath is his torn black bodyglove, soaked through from the ragged wound in his leg. This last mission of his did not go particularly well. Thankfully, Sahaal was shot with an autogun bullet, not with a hotshot las-round or bolt shell. Either of those, and he might not have been able to walk, or rather limp, to this tiny shelter.

The first order of business is properly sealing the bullet hole. His own blood has started the process, his superhuman platelets clotting the injury within seconds of taking it and covering the vulnerable flesh with a thick, fast-formed scab. Whilst that's good enough in a firefight, it's nowhere near a longer-term option. From a belt pouch, Sahaal pulls out a roll of antiseptic bandages and wraps them around the wound, then pins them in place with a small metal rod.

Next, he extracts a pair of armourglass ampoules from his field medikit. Both get slotted into his armour's primary injection port, one after the other. The first contains a potent painkiller, much more effective than the ones usually in his plate's internal chem reservoirs. Accordingly, it's also much more narcotic. The second it hits, he feels the soporific haze wash over him. His eyelids droop, his thoughts become slow and ponderous, and he can barely stay awake. Quickly, just as chemically-induced sleep begins to claim him, he jabs his ceramite-encased fingers into the soft tissue of his leg as hard as he possibly can. The stabbing burst of pain shocks him back into awareness, at least long enough to get back to work.

The second ampoule is full of an Astartes-grade healing cocktail, something to help the wound close up faster and neater than his body would on its own. With near-numb fingers, Sahaal slips the vial into its port, and whilst there's no great reaction to it like its predecessor, he can feel his tissue knitting back together. There's still the issue of the round itself, buried in the flesh like a miniature boarding torpedo, but he can extract that later. When he's back at Milliways, where there's actually proper medical equipment.

A few seconds later, and the haze that clouds his mind takes over, and he can't keep his eyes open any longer. Sahaal falls into a deep, dreamless unconsciousness, his armoured form slumped against the thin wall of the lift car.


	23. Waiting

It is as he is waiting for his target to arrive that Sahaal has his revelation.

He's crouched on a rooftop, staring down onto a parade to celebrate some Imperial victory or another. A full regiment of Imperial Guardsmen march in formation, the steel and stone canyons of the hive city ringing with the sound of their jackboots on the asphalt roadway. Banners decorated with elaborate crests and embroidered with the names of victories long since passed out of memory wave in what dull sunlight peers through the thick polluted clouds. Each man and woman has a lasgun shouldered and a brazier in their off hand, in which fragrant incense burns.

Behind them, an armoured battalion rumbles along, filling the air with the greasy scent of promethium smoke. Leman Russ battle tanks come first, followed by a dozen Basilisk howitzers, a full maniple of Chimera APCs, Hellhound incinerator tanks, Salamander reconnaissance vehicles, Sentinel walkers and even a pair of Banehammer superheavies. Loudhailers mounted on their armoured camouflage-painted hulls blare out scratchy hymns. Tank commanders with chests full of citation ribbons and gleaming medals stand in their hatches, saluting the icons of the Emperor on every building.

The crowd that lines the streets is no less impressive. Hundreds of thousands of hivers, clerks and manufactorum workers and lay-technicians, all standing behind pre-fabricated crowd control barriers. They cheer and wave and chant and throw fake plastic roses under the tank treads. Some local ritual, Sahaal guesses. Perhaps in celebration, or perhaps to bring luck.

A blaring of pre-recorded trumpets signals his target's arrival. Behind the massive display of military power comes what is essentially a moving stage, propelled by tracked units and a gigantic, smoking engine along the road. In the centre is a lavish throne of rich wood, furnished with plush carmine cushions and embellished with cabochons of sliver, pearl and gold. Around it, an honour guard of Tempestus Scions, glittering in their master-crafted wargear, face out into the crowd with their hellguns. Above it, a servo-skull hovers, recording the event with its inbuilt picters.

On it, Sahaal's target sits, smugly waving to the gathered masses. She is a high-level commander, her uniform covered in service medals and encrusted with gold braid. Her long black hair is braided down her back and soaked in perfumed oils so strong Sahaal can smell them from the rooftop. Only her head is uncovered, her dark skin decorated with whorls of pale victory paint.

Sahaal doesn't know her name. He doesn't know her role in the vast machinery of the Imperium. He doesn't know her rank, her command or what she did to deserve this parade. All he knows is that she is an Imperial hero, and his duty is to kill heroes.

It is then that the revelation hits him. These are not the tactics of a Raptor. A Raptor would divebomb the procession, flinging grenades into the crowd and slaughtering the marching soldiers before gutting the hero before the eyes of this hive world. That's what he would usually do. These are the tactics of something, someone, much different.

Back in the days of the Legions, there were warriors who did not work within the command structure, who did not fight with their brothers in arms. They were known as the Moritat. Depending on who you asked, they were either death incarnate, or dangerous rogues. Lone killers who hunted down targets no one else could, and eliminated them by any means necessary.

A few months ago, Sahaal would have said that he had nothing in common with them. Now, after Equixus, Milliways and all the missions he's run, he is them. In theory, he might be First Captain of the Eighth, but in practice it's just him planning and executing strikes at the Imperium. He still has his jump pack and his claws, but ever more often, he finds himself needing other methods to finish his work. Arms deals with the Alpha Legion. Salvaging from wrecks. Using his new music collection as a weapon of war.

The pinging of a notification drags him out of his thoughts and back to reality. The mobile stage has reached its final destination. With a sadistic smirk under his helm, he pulls the detonator's trigger.

Before the Imperials started the parade, they had checked the vehicles, top to bottom. Everything had been screened for anything that might be a threat to the celebrations. They had been diligent in their duties, and the parade had been allowed to go on with no further problems.

They had not checked the buildings on route for explosives.

Demolition charges placed on the support columns of an Administratum office block opposite explode. A low rumbling echoes through the streets, loud enough to cover the cheering crowd. The Guardsmen stop where they are as one, disciplined to the last, and scan the skyline, looking for any threats that might be inbound. One of them sees the building to his right shaking and shedding parts of its ornate stonework façade and screams a warning to his comrades.

It does not help. A second later, and a tide of rubble comes crashing down on their heads. Masonry chunks, loose bricks, twisted metal, shards of glass and lengths of pipe all flow into the street below with an immense crash. Hundreds are crushed in an instant, thousands die in moments. A cloud of dust fills the air, but before it envelopes the carnage, Sahaal sees the commander fall from her throne, her head bleeding from where a chunk of stone broke against it. Debris crashes around him, shaking the building he stands on and cratering the rooftop he watches from, but he stands firm and tall, even as pieces of building clatter from his ceramite warplate.

Sahaal smiles as he inhales the sharp scent of magnitorium det-chems and burning promethium. More explosions, smaller this time, rock the wreckage, the results of disturbed ordinance cooking off in the resulting fires.

He could get used to this, these acts of sabotage. They will never replace psychological warfare or aerial assault as his favoured methods of war, but he is more than willing to add them to his repertoire.

He could get used to the title as well, add it to his existing list. First Captain Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Eighth Legion. Raptor of the Night Lords. Moritat of Milliways Bar.


	24. Kitchen

It's not just in his own universe that Sahaal goes scrounging for supplies. The pantry in Milliways has almost every conceivable foodstuff, beverage and consumable in the multiverse, so of course he's going to pilfer from it every once in a while. He might be able to get fresh food when he's in the bar, but it's always good to have emergency stocks in his room, and something nicer than Legion rations in his belt pouches. 

With this in mind, he gets to work. A satchel is slung over his shoulder, to help him carry his purloined goods. Of course, Bar'll simply add what he takes to his tab, but for now, it's all free. 


	25. Lake

Ten thousand years of sleep is enough for one lifetime, so Sahaal doesn't really do or want much of it. Of course, he does need to, but for four or five hours every few days. This gives him a lot of spare time. He's never had spare time before, so he's not sure what do with it. 

One night, he sits by the side of the lake with a large bottle of something called Jack Daniels, and spends seven hours skipping rocks across the calm, cool waters. He makes a game of it, one sip from the bottle for each time he can skip the stone more than five times. By the time the sun comes up and sends him scurrying back inside with burning eyes, he's nicely buzzed. He's also drenched head to toe thanks to a reprisal by some sort of gigantic squid-like creature for hitting it by accident, but he doesn't mind. Too much. 


	26. Landlord

"So, I hear we have a new landlord. You wouldn't know anything about that, you?"

Up until he hears that voice, Sahaal thinks that he's alone in his hanger bay. He's been spending more and more time in it recently, as he restores the old Storm Eagle he and Cassian found in the garage to airworthiness. The voice, low and rich, startles him as he works on repairing the chin-mounted heavy bolters. His adrenaline spikes with his surprise, and almost on subconscious instinct, he grabs a large monkey wrench from the bag of tools beside him.

Sahaal stands up from his crouch, all the while feeling eyes on his back. Slowly, he turns around, the rubber soles of his boots squeaking on the floor. Above him, on one of the gantries that makes up the skeletal second story of the repair bay is an Astartes he doesn't recognise.

The newcomer is clad in battered Mark V warplate, the armour sections battle-scarred and painted a faded blue-green. A hooded mesh camo-cloak, the trailing end tattered and stained with mud, hangs over his shoulders. In his hands, he cradles a Legion-issue scoped sniper rifle, the stock covered in neat kill-markings. Over his left eyepiece, a set of high-powered targeting optics rest, linked with thin wires to his helm display.

On his pauldron, a simple green stenciled icon of a hydra is painted. Sahaal tenses, his fist clenching around the wrench. If the Alpha Legion are in Milliways, every single patron is in very, very big trouble.

"You can put down that wrench, too. I'm not going to kill you, Sahaal."

Cautiously, he puts the wrench on the heavy bolter's housing next to him, well within reach. "How are you here?"

The Alpha Legionnaire laughs, a blurt of static and mirth coming from his external address speakers. "I am of the Twentieth. How do you think, Talonmaster?"

Sahaal swears under his breath. Damned Alpha Legion. They hoard secrets and knowledge like nobody else, and to be honest with himself, Sahaal isn't as surprised as he might he that they know about Milliways. If he could stumble across it in a darkened alleyway, they could certainly find it. "What do you want?"

He drums his fingers on the worn stock of his rifle. "That's a better question. I'm here for you."

"Me."

"Yes. You." The Alpha Legionnaire grabs hold of the gantry railing and swings himself over it in one fluid motion. He hits the reinforced, oil-stained concrete floor with a dull thud. Cracks spiderweb out from his armoured feet. "As I said, we appear to have a new landlord." He pulls out a folded piece of A4 paper from one of his ammunition pouches and hands it to Sahaal.

The Night Lord reads the text printed on it, his eyes going wide behind his tinted goggles. "This is the advertisement I put out on the notice board for this place, just an hour ago. How...?"

"Don't concern yourself with how. Only concern yourself with what happens next. You see," the Legionnaire says, his arms going wide to encompass the cavernous room, "this is all Alpha Legion property."

"I didn't realise. There weren't exactly any signs up." Given the modifications made to the Storm Eagle, he'd suspected that whatever party that had last used it was not the Eighth Legion, but to have those suspicions proved by an operative of the Twentieth is something else entirely. Frankly, he's not too sure what to say.

"No, of course there wouldn't be. But, it is. Or at least, it was."

"Was?" Now Sahaal's getting really confused. This is not how he thought his Saturday afternoon would go.

"It's yours now. Really, we don't mind. It's not like there's much to lose here. An old-model Storm Eagle, a handful of specialist tools and some cabinets. There is nothing here we cannot replace easily."

"Oh. Well then, thank you."

He waves Sahaal off. "Think nothing of it. It's a gift. All we ask in return is that you do a few things for us."

Now Sahaal really starts to get worried. He's not scared, because that's biologically impossible for him, but there's a feeling in the pit of his stomach that tells him that he isn't going to like what happens next. "And what might these be?"

From a hard case on his thigh, the Alpha Legionnaire pulls out a thin dataslate and hands it to Sahaal. "Given your unique position and specialised skillset, we'd like to have you available for a few missions against our enemies. Strike at targets it would be difficult for even us to reach. Think of it as repaying us for the gunship and repair bay. Quid pro quo, yes? All you have to do is keep the slate in your room, and complete any tasks that we send you. Is that clear?"

Sahaal nods. As far as he can see, there's not much he can do but agree.

"Good. I'm glad we could reach an agreement." His bright crimson eyepieces seem to glow a little brighter. "Don't worry about it for now. We'll contact you."

As the Alpha Legionnaire turns to leave through the door out into the garage, Sahaal's bemused mind finally begins to start working normally again, or close to it. "What should I call you?"

He turns at Sahaal's shouted question, and chuckles. "I think Phocron will do for now, thank you."


	27. Wedding

There's a wedding Outside this morning, in one of the forest clearings. In the past few days, tents and canopies have sprung up from the grass, strings of fairy lights are now hanging from the boughs of evergreens and a stage has materialised in between a pair of birch saplings. A band is sat on the wooden slats, tuning their instruments in a discordant cloud of noise. Men and women in tuxedos are rushing here, there and everywhere, putting the finishing touches on the buffet and the table settings.

Sahaal hasn't been invited. There's a number of good reasons for that, the main one being that he doesn't know the bride and groom. He doesn't actually know their names, come to think of it. It doesn't matter.

What does is that they have a chocolate cake. In a roundabout way, he thinks to himself as he sneaks along the side of the main catering tent, this is all Sunshine's fault. She was the one to introduce him to chocolate, she was the one that spent ten solid minutes extolling its virtues. If she hadn't, then Sahaal wouldn't be doing what he's about to.

He carefully unzips a side flap, keeping one eye on the commotion outside before slipping in. His booted feet leave light impressions in the short grass as he steals along a row of collapsible tables and chairs. Twice he has to stop, as servers come into tweak tiny details. Eventually, he makes it to the buffet table.

The sheer amount of food laid out is staggering. Small sandwiches, cocktail sausages, a platter of assorted meat slices, full baguettes resting on heated plates, overflowing bowls of fruit and several dozen more options. A mortal man could sustain himself for a month or more on the fare, with ease.

The centrepiece is the trio of cakes. One is a carrot cake, covered with cream-coloured icing and tiny edible carrot decorations. Towering over it is the wedding cake, three tiers of white-iced, jam-filled sponge adorned with catering pearls and frosting love hearts and other culinary icons of affection and romance. Atop it is a pair of figures, a mortal man and woman rendered in solid plastic in their wedding finery.

The third cake is Sahaal's, though no one else knows that yet. A rectangular slab of jet-black sponge, covered with off-white icing that undulates like the waves of an ocean. It sits on a plastic tray, a groove around the edge for where the lid fits. Sahaal finds the lid, or at least one like it that fits, under the table in a caterer's box. With a snap of clasps, the clear cover is locked in place, protecting the cake inside from harm.

Sahaal grabs it by the top-mounted handle and heads for the flap. Time for him to go.


	28. Rats

Sahaal steps through the front door of Milliways, and into another world. Once, this would have been a mind-boggling event, something to spin his consciousness around like a child's scrumball rattle. Now, it's Tuesday. Possibly. He sometimes gets the day names wrong.

This other world doesn't seem to be a particularly outstanding one. The room he finds himself in is small, with wooden and stone walls. What light there is comes from lanterns and tallow candles, casting their yellow glow across the rough surfaces. A small bed is crammed into one corner of the room, covered with thick cured furs and roughspun sheets. To his right, there is a desk, stacked with leather-bound books that smell of aged parchment paper.

"I can hear you up there. Come on down, don't be shy. Nothing to fear in here."

Sahaal's head jerks towards the voice coming in through the open door. It is a human voice, undoubtedly, with the warm quality that comes from age and long service. Surprisingly, his accent, because the voice is most definitely male, has a few twinges of provincial Low Gothic to it. He can't be in the 42nd Millennium. Can he?

Carefully, he walks out of the small bedroom and on to a balcony that serves as an upper floor. Below him, under a ceiling bolstered by wooden rafters, are a half dozen trestle tables, tiny candles guttering on their tops. Barrels are tucked into the corners, giving off a wonderfully familiar scent. Sahaal grins. Of all the places he could end up in the multiverse, he's found himself in another tavern.

He descends the stairs, their worn wood creaking under his heavy combat boots. He isn't midnight clad, not tonight. Most of his armour is too busy being disassembled across the floor of his room to be of any use, anyway.

There is only one other person in the tavern, the man standing behind the bar. He is a tall man, bowed slightly with age, and perhaps between forty and fifty years old, Terran Standard. A dirty white shirt and boiled leather vest cover broad shoulders, and leather cuffs shield his wrists. Dark brown hair, the colour of Sunshine's addictive chocolate, rings a balding scalp, with more of the same hair coming down to form an impressive set of muttonchops and moustache.

"'Ello there, sir." His eyes go wide as he gets a proper look at Sahaal in the gloom. "By Sigmar, you're a big one, ain't you?"

That's quite the understatement, and an impressive lack of fear. Sahaal likes him already.

"Yes, I am." He glances around. "Where are we?"

The man looks puzzled for a second. "Bloody hell! You must be lost, mate, if you're asking a question like that. Ubersreik. We're in the city of Ubersreik, on the River Teufel. As for this place, it's the Red Moon Inn. Best drinking house in the city, and I'm its barkeep, Herr Franz Lohner. Call me Franz, please. Can I get you something?"

"Yes. Yes, please. What's the strongest alcoholic drink you've got?"

Franz reaches under the countertop, and fills a leather-wrapped tankard to the brim with something from a tap built into the bar. It smells a little like the cleaning solvents used to scrub plasma conduits. He places it on the wooden counter with a flourish, slopping a few drops onto the wood finish. "Here you are. One mug of Bugman's XXXXX. It's Dwarf drink, so be careful."

Sahaal takes one look at the frothy ale, and downs it all in a single pull. It burns going down, his eyesight is a little blurry and he feels like someone has played the percussion part of a heavy metal track with his eardrums. "Lovely. Thank you." He means it. Hopefully there's a keg or two in the cellars back at Milliways.

Something has been bothering him ever since he first looked down from the balcony. "How come there aren't any others here? This is a city drinking den, it should be thronging."

Franz laughs, a bitterly humorous sound. "You really are that unobservant, aren't you, eh? Take a look outside, then ask me that same question." He jerks a thumb in the direction of a pair of windows.

Slightly perturbed, Sahaal steps over to the cold-frosted glass. He wipes some of the icy residue away, pulls his goggles down, and peers out.

The windows look on to a narrow cobbled street lined with tightly-packed buildings, the same as any other city road on a mediaeval world. Lanterns burn on poles, their chains crashing and kicking in the night-time wind. Somewhere out in the rest of the town, someone's house is burning. Sahaal's enhanced nose twitches. No. He's wrong. Houses, plural. A large conflagration, fuelled mostly by wood and wattle-and-daub. A few hints of roasting meat lurk in there too, both human and animal.

Entirely inappropriately, it makes his mouth water.

In the darkness of one of the alleyways off the main street, something stirs. No mortal man could have caught it, nor could most Astartes, but Sahaal is a Night Lord. It's right there in the name, as Sergeant Ruthven used to say.

It doesn't move like a human, but rather scuttles in a hunched, halting run. Crimson eyes, beady and bright in the gloom, roam over the landscape. The thing goes from rubbish pile to rubbish pile in the alley, rooting through them for some unknown reason. Food, perhaps, or searching for something. Sahaal doesn't know, or care. He simply watches it.

It steps forward into a sliver of moonlight by accident, and when it reels back hissing, Sahaal finally gets a good look at it. Four foot tall, perhaps closer to five. Brown fir, oily and matted. Sharp, dirty fangs that protrude from its top lip. Spindly, malnourished arms that end in claws, one of which has a crude spear clutched in its vice-like grip.

The thing looks like a humanoid rat, and judging by the weapon, a sentient humanoid rat. It moves like a rat, squeals like a rat, and stinks like a rat. Sahaal isn't a biologist, but he's pretty sure bipedal vermin aren't natural.

As quickly as he spotted it, he loses sight of the beast. Reeling back from the moonlight, it scurries back into the darkness. He turns back to Franz, looking the innkeeper straight in the eye.

"What was that?"

The mortal man sighs. "That was a Skaven, lad. One of the Ratmen. Time was, they used to be myths. Scary stories to tell the little ones at night, make sure they didn't sneak out of bed." He laughs, a small, bitter sound. "Now none of us want to sneak out. They came up from underground perhaps a week ago, pouring out from the sewers and catacombs. Half the city's burning, and the rest is cowering in fear. Not sure how long we can hold out, the bastards are everywhere. Like a tide."

And just like that, Sahaal gets an idea. Especially rarely for him, it's a good one.

"What if I said I might be able to help you?"


	29. Evil

The room tastes like ash, the greasy kind left after the deployment of a heavy flamer. His company is pressing hard, using the grand rafters of this wing of the palace to their advantage, but unfortunately, the Fists have heavy weapons. They do not. Sahaal ignites his pack, swooping with two other Raptors down onto the crude barricade of collapsed masonry and discarded storm shields. Even as the sons of Dorn look up, threat-warnings cluttering their visor displays, he's descending on their line like the wrath of a pagan god.

His boots hit ceramite plate with a crunch, and before the loyalist sergeant can react, his left claw has already decapitated him. Sal Gosg, to his left, blows the unhelmed head of a neophyte apart with a burst from his cut-down bolter. To his right, Tunvelsan slashes open a tactical support legionary's breastplate, the blood from the pair of burst hearts turning to a fine mist as soon as it touches the power field of his axe.

Sahaal quickly searches for his next target, and finds it in the form of a loyalist with a bolter who is taking cover behind a broken statue of some remembrancer or another. He laughs, a predatory howl of grim humour, as he fires his thruster pack, scorching the priceless marble beneath his feet.

He always enjoys these self-righteous Fists, these sons of Dorn who think themselves better than Sahaal and his kin. That's why they are here, to show the Seventh their folly in blood. And, because killing loyalists is usually quite fun.


	30. Curse

It is a curse, to be a god's son.

Many attribute that old saying to the VIII Legion, and especially to those with the painful gift of prophecy. Their gene-seed killed them from within, if they did not die from enemy action without. Sahaal has always believed that the Soul Hunter’s old aphorism was very much applicable to every single one of the Legions.

The Third were dragged down with their primarch into a spiral of excess and debauchery that has left them nothing more than jaded, sense-obsessed freaks. Perturabo’s warriors grind themselves against the fortresses of the galaxy in battle plans more mathematics than strategy. The Death Guard, many of them unwillingly, succumbed to despair alongside Mortarion and slipped headlong into the foul embrace of the Plague Lord. It was the Cyclops that truly doomed the Fifteenth, with his foolish and ill-prepared dealing with the God of Change. Horus's failure ensured his sons suffered a slow, drawn-out death. The preaching of the Urizen and his blind faith in the Dark Gods led to the Word Bearers becoming more zealots than the soldiers they were intended to be, and who knows what Alpharius Omegon did to his Legion?

All the Legions can claim that statement holds truth for them, but in Sahaal's mind, it has always been most applicable to the World Eaters than anyone else. Their heads were cut open and horrific machinery implanted to induce berserker rages and used as disposable shock troops, all on the orders of their gene-father. They lost whatever humanity they had left when they were re-joined with their primarch.

Truly, they are cursed to be the sons of a god.

* * *

The door brings him out into a dingy hallway, lit only by tombstone-shaped windows of grime-encrusted glass. Glow-globes hang overhead, dead and dark from a lack of power. Sahaal's helm vents let in an acrid smell of garbage and death. Somewhere outside, an artillery piece booms, and the vibrations shake dust and chunks of debris from the hallway's ceiling.

As always when Sahaal goes exploring outside Milliways, he is clad in his warplate, with his bolter mag-locked to his thigh and claws at the ready. Four frag grenades hang from his belt, and a pair of krak grenades are tucked into one of his pouches.

He steps over to the nearest window, and tries to wipe away some of the dirt. When he fails, he puts his fist through it, then widens the hole with his forearm. Outside, through the broken shards, he sees a street, littered with the charred hulks of Chimera APC's and mass-haulers. Corpses, most in stained worker overalls but some in tattered red robes and sporting sparking augmetics, dot the pock-marked tarmac. From the cogwheel and skull insignia on more than a few of the bodies, Sahaal reasons this must be a forge world of the Mechanicum. Across the street, a squat, slab-sided square of a hab building stands, a cratered and smoking mirror of the one he's currently in. The sky is filled with clouds darkened by pollution, so it's impossible to tell what time of day it is. He'd say it was good to be back home, but it's not.

Sahaal turns back to the hallway, and spots a symbol hacked into the iron walls with a chainblade. He grimaces behind his helm. Even though many of his kin have fallen to the Ruinous Powers and wear that damned eight-pointed star, he would never consider giving himself to such base devotion.

Given the icon in the metal, he's pretty sure that it was a Chaos armada that overran this world. This makes things a little harder; Sahaal may have to fight Chaos Space Marines with as much or infinitely more combat experience than him. It might be a fair fight, which he doesn't want, or an unfair fight not biased towards him, which he wants even less. Of course, he could always turn back, but why would he? There's nothing to do at Milliways, and he doesn't want to spend another day just sitting around, so he heads down the corridor.

Every five meters, there is a metal hatch in the wall, many of them open. Each one leads to a small hab dwelling, where workers in the Mechanicus foundries once lived. Each one showcases a new horror.

A dented Guardsman's helmet sits in the middle of a pool of old blood, too much to have come from one person. Two depleted charge packs for a las-weapon are beside it.

The furniture in one hab has been overturned and scattered about, hard mattresses mixing with ragged children's toys and stained clothing. Nothing of even remote value remains.

Large jagged strips of offcut steel are welded over the next hatch, and small black flies buzz in a swarm around the gaps between the door and the frame. Sahaal can smell the unmistakable sickly-sweet scent of human decay wafting from behind the barricaded portal.

In the middle of the dirt-encrusted floor of the fourth hab, there is a circle made of strange runes carved into the metal with a blade. Pools of wax dot the outside, the remnants of spent tallow candles. The entire crude construction is scorched and covered by a thick soot-like material Sahaal can't quite recognise.

The fifth hatch he comes to reveals a slightly bigger room than the previous ones, perhaps a family one. Like the rest, it is fairly spartan, with a pair of thin beds, a table made of factory-pressed metal, a pict-screen and a combination toilet/sink. Unlike the others, it is still occupied.

A massive figure in bright crimson power armour kneels in the middle of the room, facing a skull placed on the table and surrounded by black candles that give off a smell that to Sahaal is a mixture between rose petals and spoiled food. The Space Marine, for that is what the giant is, is leaning on a massive chainaxe, its handle wrapped in tanned human skin and its motor revving. The air stinks of promethium fumes and blood, and a strange muttering emanates from the Marine's poorly maintained vox-grille, the words given a roughness by the ancient armour systems.

Suddenly, and with a great whine of armour servos and muscle-cables, the Astartes rises to his feet and turns around. Sahaal finds himself staring into the cracked and dirty vision blocks of a Sarum-pattern respirator helm. Brass edges each one of the ceramite plates, and a pair of off-white horns sprout from each side of his archaic helm. Sprays of old blood, dried to a brown crust, decorate the warplate, as well as several bleached skulls hanging from a tattered equipment belt. Finally, Sahaal spots the Legion emblem on the Astartes' right pauldron: a fanged maw engulfing a verdant green and blue world, partially obscured by dried blood splatter.

Behind his own helm, Sahaal draws in a sharp intake of breath. He fought beside the Twelfth Legion during both the Crusade and the Great War, first when they were the War Hounds, then when they were the World Eaters. Whilst he did know that they had fallen to the worship of the Blood God, he had no idea how far they had fallen.

The World Eater revs his chainaxe, spraying giblets of blood and broken bone from the teeth. In a low voice, weary with pain, he says; "Who you? Imperial?"

Sahaal doesn't want a fight, as far as he's concerned, even if they are from different Legions with different ideologies, they're both against the Imperium. So, instead of unsheathing his claws or pulling his bolter, he taps his Legion emblem with his armoured finger. "I'm a Night Lord. Eighth Legion. We were on Horus's side during the Great War, like you were. I fought at the Battle of Varkis with your Legion."

The World Eater pauses, his axe going silent. Ten seconds, fraught with tension and potential violence, pass by. Then, just as Sahaal's about to bolt for the door, he responds. "You're Night Lord?"

Sahaal answers in that over-happy, slightly frantic tone of one who does not want to have his life ended with an axe this minute, no thank you. "Yes, yes. I'm a Night Lord."

"You serve Powers. You don't need to have your skull and soul offered to the Blood God." With that, as if that was all the explanation needed, the World Eater turns back to his miniature altar and starts praying again in that unnerving, inhuman whispered tongue.

Sahaal takes the hint. Even if he doesn't serve the Ruinous Powers, even if he despises them and their followers as much as an Imperial inquisitor does, he's not stupid. He's perfectly happy to let the son of Angron believe he pays homage to them. Still, he keeps one hand on his bolter the entire way back to the door to Milliways.


	31. Gunslinger

The desert way station is nowhere in particular. It is like any other in a hundred different universes; a fuel depot, a restaurant, a couple of goods stores and a maintenance bay. All abandoned, for what must have been years. The asphalt is cracked from lack of repair, the few cars parked around rust in place and even the graffiti on the walls is faded from its once pastel colours.

Desert surrounds it, miles upon miles of mostly flat, burning sand. The highway the station once served goes east-west, out into a heat-shimmering eternity on either side. A few jagged mountains rise in the distance, flat against the bright blue sky. Blue sky stretches far up into the upper atmosphere, devoid of any clouds whatsoever. It looks like it could be anywhere, really.

Wherever it is, in whatever timeline or continuity this is, no one cares about it anymore.

That makes it perfect for Sahaal's uses. Milliways is great, but there are things that he simply cannot do in the Bar. Somehow, he's certain that torture would be frowned upon by most of the patrons. He understands, although he does not agree.

So he comes here. Today is no different.

* * *

He is perched on a broken air conditioning unit on the roof of the restaurant when the gunslinger wakes up. The man's eyes flutter open, groaning from the harsh sunlight. Usually, Sahaal would conduct his interrogations after dark, but the last thing this particular captive knew was a shadowy cavern. He wants the disorientation.

His prisoner pushes himself up from the concrete slab roof, his ragged black trenchcoat pooling around him. Pale hands go for hip holsters on instinct, reaching for the butts of stub revolvers that aren't there. Sahaal chuckles, and reaches behind him to bring the weapons in question into the light.

"Looking for these?" The man does not respond with words, only glaring into Sahaal's helm lenses with rage in his eyes. The Night Lord matches his stare as he crushes the pair of pistols in his armoured gauntlet. He brings his arm back, and throws the mangled mass of metal and wood off the roof. A clatter comes up from the street as it hits something below.

"Pitiful things, weren't they? Not real weapons. Just crude leadslingers that require no real skill or true talent to fight with. Aim, shoot and watch your enemy die with the pull of a trigger. Tell me, where is the challenge in that?" The gunslinger doesn't respond with anything more meaningful than a curse spat through dried-out lips. He tries to get up properly this time. Sahaal doesn't let him. A ceramite boot pushes none too gently down onto his chest, pinning him to the roof. With a mental command and a click of internal mechanisms, his foot-claws drop down from their resting position. The sharpened points jab into the vulnerable flesh between his ribs, about as unsubtle a point as it is possible to make.

"I don't want curses, I want names. Your Inquisitor. The rest of his retinue, and where I can find them. If I get those, you will die, but you will die quickly."

Some measure of courage bubbles up from inside the gunslinger's psyche. He spits at Sahaal, the saliva arcing onto the midnight blue of his thigh plate. "And what if I don't?"

"You die slowly." A harsh bark of laughter from the gunslinger shows what he thinks of that. "You think I mean hours. No. I mean days, little man. Weeks, even. I can stretch out your pain for as long as I want to. I can keep you alive as an eyeless, limbless wreck of a human being, with only the ability to scream left." That's not strictly true, Sahaal would guess that with the resources at his disposal and the general resilience of a human body, he can get ten days out of this particular captive. But, he's not to know that.

Sahaal angles his pauldron down into the gunslinger's field of vision. A tap on the daemonic, bat-winged skull painted there draws his attention upwards. He sees the man's eyes go wide, and smiles behind his respirator unit. It might not be the most striking reaction revealing his allegiance has ever had, but it's certainly satisfying. "I assume you know what that is. So, now we have established that I'm not, in fact, bluffing, let's begin."

* * *

He breaks by nightfall. All through the heat of the day, he resists Sahaal. Blades drag screams out of him, but none of the information he needs. Sand is more effective, fragments of names and locations spat out between choking mouthfuls. But, as the sun turns its face and sinks behind the western horizon, the Night Lord breaks out the fire. That has him begging for mercy within minutes.

Sahaal carefully extinguishes the portable brazier and places it to one side, the mixed smell of wood-ash and cooked flesh saturating the air. He leans in close to the gunslinger's tattered lips, close enough to see the trickles of blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. Then, the name, the one that had eluded Sahaal for nearly ten hours comes out, breathed from a throat made hoarse by screaming.

_"Uhhrrggg... Inqui... Inquisitor Sebastian P... Palinus."_

"Thank you." Sahaal means it. It might not seem like it, but he really does. He unsheathes his right claw, activating the disruptior field and letting lightning flow across the superconductive alloy. Without any preamble, he plunges the quartet of blades into the gunslinger's heart. The man jerks once, and stills forever. If he still had eyes, they would have rolled back in their sockets.

That's that, then. A dozen names, a mixture of acolytes and agents. Four safehouse locations, scattered across the rim of the Ultima Segmentum. The name of the man that hunted him down a blind alley and into Milliways.

The name of the man that killed Mita Ashyn.

Sahaal flexes his claws in anticipation. First, he's going to dump this gunslinger's corpse in a shallow desert grave. After that, he's going to go back to Milliways and arm himself to the teeth. And then, he's going to hunt this bastard Palinus down and hang his body somewhere everyone can see what happens when you take on the Eighth Legion.

This week seems to be looking up.


	32. Endless

Each swipe is a killing swipe. With this many enemies, they can't help but be anything but.

A steady stream of crazed cultists stream from the rough-cut rock passageways. Most of them are no threat at all. Half-starved, their flesh covered by colourful rags and scarred with eldritch runes of worship. Their weapons break against his warplate, shivs and clubs for the most part. Whatever was to hand when they were roused from worship. Their only strength is in numbers, and even that is waining as foot-long lightning-wreathed talons slice them into steaming chunks.

It is, however, not waining fast enough. The sheer weight of the human tide is forcing him up the slope, and no amount of bladework will solve it. Sahaal snarls, the sound coming through his vox-grille as a hiss of static. He needs to use other methods.

Reluctantly, he ignites his jump pack, the twinned thrusters propelling him into the air with a rumbling howl. Screaming is left in his wake as the cultists nearest to him burn in the backwash. The familiar scent of burning human flesh comes a second later.

Sahaal grabs hold of the cavern's wall, smashing handholds in the slimy rock with his gauntlets and boots. Loose debris falls in showers from the impacts. He twists his torso around with a grind of servos, and his right hand drops to the worn grip of his boltgun. For a moment, he hesitates. Does he really want to do this? Use a firearm, a primitive slug-throwing catapult with provenance, against mortal men and women?

Others would have questions of ethics running through their minds. To Sahaal, this is about pride. Using a bolter against something like a veteran Imperial Astartes or as a weapon of fear is one thing. Against zealots like those below him just seems wrong. He can defeat them without it.

Quickly, and with a touch of shame, he pulls his hand away. There is more than one way to break a bastion, as the old saying goes. Some are subtle. Some are loud. Some are careful. Some are brutal. In Sahaal's experience, those are generally the simplified options, and you only ever have a choice of two. He goes for loud and brutal.

Sucking in a deep breath of stale, smoke-flavoured air, he fills his three lungs to capacity, turns his external address speakers up to maximum and screams. There is no other word for it, in truth. It shakes the cavern, sending loose rocks and stalactites tumbling down into the rabble. The effect on the cultists themselves is no less striking.

The several-score-strong horde takes the brunt of the audio barrage. Eardrums rupture, delicate blood vessels burst, and pain wracks their frail bodies. Blood, rich and red and coppery, runs from their eyes, their noses, their ears and their mouths. Most fall to their knees. Some drop dead on the spot from shock-induced cardiac arrest. A wailing din fills the cavern, a hundred people vocalising their pain with one shared voice.

Sahaal pushes off from the rock face, freefalling the twenty metres to the ground. He lands with a crunch, dust swirling up from his clawed feet. With a sadistic smirk twisting the thin lips behind his helm, he slides _Unguis Raptus_ from their sheaths. They lock into place with a click of finality, which in many ways, it is.

The first one to die is a woman, with dust in her tangled blonde hair and a strange icon sewn onto the chest of her ragged tunic. Her throat is sliced open, the spurting blood adding to the rivulets already on her face. Death comes quickly for her, as it comes quickly for all the cult followers in the cavern. Sahaal is feeling merciful tonight. No one has to suffer more than a couple of minutes of boundless agony before they never have to feel anything again.

It only takes a couple of minutes to kill them all, incapacitated as they are. Soon, Sahaal stands alone in the large cavern, surrounded by bodies and covered in blood. He sighs. He really has to stop going through the front door at random times. It only brings trouble.

On the other hand, he's got not much else to do, so he might as well keep himself busy. Besides which, if these cultists are anything like those he has known over his long years, then killing them is a public service, at least in his mind.

With his mind made up, he finds a relatively intact corpse and drags it out of the charnel pile to examine. It used to be a man, twenty five to forty standard years of age, but now he is a mere husk, all life drained from him thanks to the cauterised gashes on his chest. On the back of his ragged top is a stitched-on rune similar to the scars on his exposed arms. An upside-down arc, split by a pointed line. Sahaal is no expert, but he's seen enough fell icons to know one when he sees it, even if this one looks like none he's come across before.

It's simple, primal, not like the complex devotation symbols of power owned by the Gods of the Warp. That alone puts Sahaal on edge. Icons are like heraldic crests. The older they are, the simpler they are. Two lines is about as simple as possible, so logically, whatever it represents is very, very old, and powerful enough to attract scores of human worshippers.

The man's corpse has nothing else of note, except for the large rock still clutched in his hand. He stands back up again, and starts off down one of the passageways, leaving the site of his slaughter behind. Whatever Bar has sent him into to this time, Sahaal won't find out standing around knee-deep in the dead.

* * *

After what his helm chronometer tells him is twenty minutes of walking through the maze of tunnels, he finds the door. It isn't particularly notable in and of itself, just a simple wooden portal engraved with intricate designs and fitted with a pair of wrought iron handles. Primitive, like something from an ice world longhouse, and completely at odds with the mine-like surroundings.

Sahaal cautiously moves to the double doors, his hand coiling around one handle. The metal is warm to the touch, like it has been left out in the sun on a summer's day. He pulls it open, ready at a second's notice to unsheathe his claws.

Inside, it is very different. A room has been hacked out of the rock, with walls made of rough-carved stone blocks imported from somewhere else. Torches blaze in wall sconces, casting dancing, flickering shadows over the small space. Wooden rafters hang overhead, the carved beams holding up a tiled ceiling. Another set of doors, identical to the ones that he just came through, stand across from him. This room is largely empty, and the setup reminds Sahaal of a voidship's airlocks. Somewhere used as a buffer between one area and another.

Shrugging, he opens the second set of doors. The room beyond is walled with the same sort of stone, roofed by the same kind of tiles, held up by the same wooden rafters, but there the similarities end. This room is circular, and the walls lined with bookshelves, each one bowing under the weight of leather-bound volumes, ornate scrollcases, thick sheaves of parchment, folios of charts, file folders and battered dataslates. A great chandelier, a web-like construction of wrought-iron struts festooned with dripping wax and burning wicks, lights the room with a soft glow. Ornamental rugs on the bare stone floor give the impression of homeliness, and assorted pennants hanging from the rafters add to the riot of colour.

The most interesting thing in the room, however, is the desk. Smooth wood, like the rafters but darker and more knotted, carved into a crescent moon shape and embellished with delicate cabochons around the edges. The tiny beads of gemstone glitter in the candlelight. On its surface, a large tome lies open, the yellowed pages filled with tight, cursive handwriting.

He steps behind the desk, pushing a cushioned throne to the side to allow his armoured bulk some room. The writing is not in any Gothic dialect he knows, or in any of the other two dozen or so languages he's learnt over the years. There isn't even much similarly to anything he knows, but that doesn't particularly mean anything. In a galaxy with millions of tongues, it would take lifetimes to discover them all, let alone become fluent in each.

A sudden chill cuts through the air, disturbing him from his thoughts. It is no natural temperature drop, for if it was he wouldn't be able to feel it through his climate-controlled warplate. Hoarfrost gathers on the walls, making them shine like machine oil in the dull light. Sahaal unsheathes his claws, half in preparation, and half in paranoia. Lightning crackles across the tines of superconductive alloy as he scans the room for whatever warp-touched thing could be causing this.

The book in front of him begins to turn its own pages. At first, it is slow and deliberate, as if a man with crippled hands is reading it. It speeds up, a dozen pages a second, and then two dozen. The sound of rustling paper fills the room. Sahaal steps back, hoping that this isn't the first sign of a daemonic manifestation. Finally, the last page curls onto its predecessor, and the leather cover slams down on the tightly bound stack of paper with a thud that rings of finality.

There is an icon burned into the hard, cracked cover. A great serpent eating its own tail, the ouroboros sigil of the Thousand Sons Legion. Sahaal scowls under his helm. Sorcerers. Nothing good ever comes from them, only Warp-touched destruction.

He doesn't have long to think on any potential danger, because the closing book must have triggered some unseen mechanism or spell. From one of the bookshelves, a beam of flickering light is fired from a brass orb resting on a velvet cushion. Sahaal almost destroys it on instinct before he realises what it is. A hololithic recorder, designed to contain short bursts of moving image and sections of audio.

The light coalesces on the flagstone floor into a lifesize monochrome representation of an Astartes. His warplate is worked in the baroque custom of the Fifteenth Legion, and a rich surcoat is draped around his bulky form. In his hand, he clutches a staff as tall as he is, woven with veins of psycho-active crystal and topped with a polished, fist-sized sapphire.

After a long moment, the still image becomes animated with tiny subconscious movements and twitches. A second later, and the audio kicks in, the ancient technology unable to properly synchronise the two. _"Inquisitor Kleusseo. I dearly hope it is you that gets this message, because I want to congratulate you, before you die. You were right."_

Behind him, the outer door of this sanctum slams shut. A locking bar of solid steel falls into place with a ringing thud of finality. _"All those years you fought me for. All those comrades you lost, all the men and women who died because they knew too much, every one of your colleagues who you killed because they tried to stop you. All for this. This final kernel of truth."_

Above Sahaal, the candles blow out in some piece of dramatic theatre that might have intimidated a Throne Agent. He doesn't care. It means that he can relax the flare-buffers on his eye lenses. The wan light of the hololithic projection still illuminates some of the room, but most of it is filled with deep, gritty shadow. _"There are indeed other universes out there, Obie."_

That one sentence grabs his attention like a power claw grabs a skull, hard and fast. Desperate thoughts race through his mind. Have the Thousand Sons found Milliways? Is one of the mad sons of Magnus heading for the Bar, or is it another universe that they have discovered? It is bad enough that there is at least one Alpha Legionnaire that knows of the existence of the multiverse, but the idea that more powerful beings to have access to the sort of boons that are to be found outside the 42nd Millennium is one that makes Sahaal's hearts beat faster.

 _"The sights I have seen you would not believe, or even be able to comprehend. A world in which the Long War is conducted in miniature, and the Eightfold Powers battle a warhammer-wielding god of man and his crude Empire. Some cruel version of Old Terra, where a continent is slowly becoming a toxic desert, inhabited only by gangcults and the insane remnants of a dying century. Dimensions of darkness and elder worlds in which ancient evils hold sway and twisted monsters hide in every shadow."_ The recorded sorcerer raises his sepia-toned, translucent hands to the ceiling. _"These are only the tip of the endless spear that is the true reality of our existence. I have all the time in the worlds. So much more awaits me."_

For a few moments, Sahaal's worries are soothed. He recognises none of the descriptions that the Thousand Son called out, and while one of them loose in the multiverse is a terrible thought, it is not as terrible as the chance that Milliways might be attacked. He's already lost one home. He cannot lose another.

Then, the sorcerer speaks again, and all calm goes from his being. _"But, none of that awaits you, Inquisitor. Your fate is sealed here and now. I can imagine it now. You and that little retinue of yours frantically looking around my sanctum, trying to find your end and neutralise it."_

The sorcerer almost has it right. Sahaal's eyes are darting around the space, looking for any sign of what this trap he's sprung actually is. Pressure plates, perhaps, or las-tripwires or automated turret systems. Or something more esoteric, like a summoned vortex, or a hidden pyromancy rune that will obliterate him and the rest of the room in an arcane fireball.

_"I thought it appropriate that something from the worlds you fought so long for should cut you down on my behalf. In truth, I do not know where this creature comes from. Somewhere dark and cold, no doubt, due to the thick fur and lack of eyes. My classification for it is the Great Clawed Vyrex, but the cultists in my thrall had a better name for it, when they still had their sanity and faith."_

One of the bookshelves to his left begins to rattle, the dataslates and volumes falling onto the floor in a slow shower of paper and metal. With every pound on it, it pushes forwards, the heavy oak stack screeching along the floor stones. A low rumbling growl undercuts the movement, a sound no human should be able to make. _"They called its kind shamblers."_

The bookshelf finally topples, hitting the ground with an echoing crack of wood on stone. Dust plumes up from ancient parchment as the growl gets louder and louder in the small room. Sahaal takes a step back, cautiously edging his way back to the door. A plan starts to form in his mind, fueled by his spiking adrenaline and survival instinct. Back away slowly until he reaches the desk. Turn that over and run, and hope that the obstacle slows down whatever this shambler beast is. Get to the outer door, and force it open somehow, possibly with his claws. Run back to the door to the Bar up the winding mine shaft. Go through, possibly whilst blowing up everything behind him. Down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Call it a night.

All of this flashes through his mind, in a furious blend of fragmented concepts and mental images, in under a second. The plan is solid, in his estimation. The plan works, for a few brief, glorious instants. Sahaal gets to the desk, even gets his fingers under the lip and is ready to flip it over when he glances back and sees it.

It is like nothing he has ever seen.

As the Thousand Son's recording said, the creature is covered in thick white fur and has a distinct lack of eyes. But, that cursory description hardly does it justice. It is a hulking beast, his bulk and height, with hunched shoulders and a gaping mouth filled with jagged carnivore teeth. Claws the length of a mortal's forearm and coated in ancient blackened gore extend from dangling ape-like arms. The white fur is matted and knotted with the remains of previous meals. It sniffs the air, and turns its eyeless head towards him.

For a moment, Sahaal wants to forget his plan. Stand his ground. He has the instinct to fight, to plant himself and send this strange monster that should not be to whatever lightless hell spawned it.

That doesn't last long before his Night Lord nature overrides any dreams of beast-slaying. As the shambler roars a blood-freezing cry, he runs. All dignity is forgotten, any sense of heroics discarded as he sprints at full pelt towards the door, angling his pauldron low.

He smashes through the lock, his thick ceramite battleplate splintering the ornate wood. He doesn't pauses as he dashes up the uneven tunnel, yelling all the while:

"Bar, get the bloody doors open!"


	33. Dead

Thirty hours after it went down, the dropship still smokes. A tau pulse emplacement, their xenos version of triple-A, had shot out the Storm Eagle's engines. The crew had died on impact, but had been nice enough to crash it into the jungle comprising the No Man's Land on this particular world, where neither forward Imperial units nor tau scouts can get at it. Dense thickets of vegetation prevent mass troop movements, and for now, both sides are content to leave it as it is.

Of course, Sahaal has no such barriers.

He comes through a gap between two massive tree roots from Milliways, and out into a scorched trench ten meters wide. Small pools of water have gathered in the burnt wound in the earth, the remnants of last night's rain. The same rain had taken care of most of the fires engulfing the downed ship, but some are obviously electrical in nature, and unable to be quenched by the downpour. The burnt carcass of the dropship in question is at the end of the newly-made ditch, acrid smoke coming from the blown-out engine. It looks like a gamebird shot from the sky by a hunter and left to rot.

Carefully, and with his bolter up, Sahaal heads over to the crash site, using the churned-up banks of earth as cover. It's a beautiful day in the jungle, with birds calling back and forth, brightly coloured insects buzzing from flower to flower and the faraway sounds of larger animals roaming somewhere even deeper. This apparent peace reassures Sahaal somewhat, but long years of experience tell him that can change in a microsecond.

He reaches the dropship, mag-locks his bolter into its usual place and starts studying how to get in. The Storm Eagle came down nose first, so there's little chance of being able to access the main deployment hatch. Sahaal can see at a glance that the rear deployment hatch is fused shut from weapons fire, and that there is no way for him to get in that way without heavy-duty breaching gear. He tries the right-hand hatch first, and finds it too buckled from the stresses and strains of impact. Next, he tries the left hatch and finds it much more compliant.

Midnight blue ceramite-armoured fingers worm their way into the hatch seams and start to push the solid slab of armour to the side along well-worn runners. Sahaal grunts in effort as he exerts almost all of his prodigious strength to replace the dropship's dead power systems. Soot and charred paint flecks fall like drizzle onto his gauntlets and bracers. With a groan of tortured metal, the door slides open, stopping and refusing to budge three-quarters of the way along the once-motorised runners. No matter. He can get through the gap it provides.

Once inside, Sahaal finds himself in a dark world lit only by a few lumen-strips set into the ceiling that bathe everything in a deep scarlet glow. Most of the reinforced bucket seats are empty, but three are occupied by suits of white and cobalt armour held slack by their restraints. Sahaal smiles when he sees the Chapter symbol on the left pauldron of one. The Sons of Guilliman, one of the byblow descendants of the old Thirteenth. Always nice to see dead loyalists. These three, judging by the faint smell of decay that worms its way past broken warplate seals, died in the crash. And, judging by the scorched craters and dried blood, that's just what finished them off. All three were already wounded by the time they'd even got on the dropship. They'd probably thought they were safe, and their thoughts turned to their ship in orbit and the comforts provided by their brotherhood. That adds a bit more amusement for Sahaal, knowing that this trio of corpse-worshippers had almost certainly only known despair as they died.

Still smiling behind his respirator unit, he turns to the rest of the dropship's hold. Cargo netting and secure lockboxes have broken open, disgorging their contents onto the metal floor. High-protein emergency survival rations mix with repair tools, thermal blankets, signalling flare cartridges and vox equipment. Sahaal picks his way through the morass of sundries to the armoured ordinance lockers along the right-hand side.

The pair of lockers are secured by iron chains and well-forged locks. He doesn't bother wasting his energy breaking them open, he simply unsheathes his left lightning claws and slices through the thick metal links. As they clatter to the floor, Sahaal opens the lockers with a pull on the handles.

The left locker consists of a gun rack, with baskets of bolt magazines above and below. Five of the Imperium's new bolt rifles, the ones that Guilliman himself has been distributing, are held in place by horizontal brackets. With a warrior's keen eye, Sahaal checks the weapons for damage. Four of the five would need repair that he can't do either here and now or at Milliways, like warped barrels or unusable chambers. One however, the rifle second from the bottom of the locker, is usable, with only cosmetic damage to the slab-sided casing. Sahaal grabs the boltgun from the rack, breaking open the restraining brackets with sheer force. He'll test it out back at Milliways, but for now he mag-locks it to his backpack power unit, along with four of its sickle-shaped magazines.

Then, he turns his attention to the right locker, with simply consists of five rows of pressed metal shelving with munitions boxes on each one. A quick sift through yields disappointingly little. It makes sense for the supplies to be low, since the Storm Eagle had obviously been coming back from a combat operation, but it's still a bitter pill to swallow. The Alpha Legion supplies he got will only last him so far. Still, there is a few items left: a loose bundle of light flares, a tin of fusion sealing strips and two more of the shock grenades like the ones he'd taken from the Primaris Reivers he killed on Solius.

It's not much, but it'll have to do. Before he leaves, he searches the bodies still trapped in their impact harnesses. Again, nothing much, two full magazines of bolt shells between them. Sahaal would search the pilot, but the cockpit is a mass of broken controls, loose cabling bundles and shattered warplate and flesh, all embedded firmly into the ground. There's nothing worth the effort.

So, he takes what he can get from the dead, and heads back home.


	34. Undead

Sahaal would like to think that he has a good idea of what to do in a zombie apocalypse. Films, books, television, all have provided invaluable research into the undead of the multiverse. He even has a semi-serious zombie plan written up, because it's really hard to find things to do at two in the morning.

Surprisingly, it actually helps when a wrong turn in Milliways dumps him in the middle of what appears to be a Class 2, according to Brooks' scale of outbreak intensity.

He ends up using his armour's external address speakers to blast a mixture of Queen and Led Zeppelin whilst he slices the horde to pieces with his lightning claws.


	35. Alive

"Oh, frak."

Another shell crashes through the window of the crude wattle and daub house, the wooden shutters proving no barrier to the explosive round. It skitters along the straw-covered stone floor, then explodes a second later, throwing shrapnel into the air. The rad-counter in Sahaal's helm starts clicking like a pair of castanets. Quickly, he moves cover, from his previous position by the wall to beside the cold, ash-filled hearth.

He sighs. This was not going to plan. The plan was to infiltrate this medieval world, skirt through the outlying serf villages to the local lord's castle, find the location of the spaceport the nobles kept from the lower classes, make his way to an orbit-capable craft and take it back to Milliways to pay off his tab. Sahaal had thought that the world's remote location in the galactic equivalent of flyover country and the fact that the main export was crops and hand-carved furniture would mean that there would be little challenge. Apparently, his luck is just that warpshittingly bad.

He'd come through the door from Milliways with no problems, but when he'd approached the first village, it had been much too quiet for comfort. So, Sahaal had investigated. At first, he'd only found empty houses and fields slowly growing wild, but just past the village hall, Sahaal had found the plague pit. One hundred or so villagers, all tipped into a shallow grave and quicklimed.

Sahaal was about to turn tail and head back to Milliways, so he could plan another way to pay his debts, but since his luck is pretty crap, that's when the architect of the devastation had chosen to reveal himself. A grenade had flown out from behind a drystone wall and almost shredded Sahaal. He'd taken cover in the nearest house, and that's when the rad-launcher shots had started.

Yet another radioactive grenade fires through the thin walls of the house, shaking Sahaal from his thoughts. Quickly, he dashes out of the back door before it explodes and scatters irradiated shrapnel across the tight space. His foot-claws gouge the turf and churn up the flowerbeds underfoot as he dashes out into the sunlight. Stone retaining walls are smashed apart as he runs. His eyes dart around the bucolic little village, so like the little hamlets that dot the stereotypical English countryside, looking for cover. Or, at least, some position of tactical advantages.

Sahaal spots a thatched roof on a house in front of him, which could provide some benefit in a firefight. Unfortunately, he left his jump pack in his room, so he's forced to climb first the window shutters of the house, and then use his armoured fingers and foot-claws to get enough purchase in the thick mass of water reed and sedge. It takes him thirty tense seconds for him to get up the roof, pieces of dried plant falling behind him. No sooner than has he got up to the top and taken cover behind the thick brick chimney, than his attacker comes through the house he just vacated and reveals himself.

A Plague Marine comes out into the village, the festering aura around him wilting the flowers in the hanging baskets and killing the garden grass. His warplate is a sickly green colour, some ancient void-sealed Mark III variant. Gaps and rents in the armour let rotting flesh and corpse juices through in foul streams. Flies buzz around the son of Mortarion in a thick cloud. Icons of Nurgle are displayed on his pauldrons in place of any Legion or Chapter symbols. A Deathshroud-pattern rad launcher, with its cylindrical shell hopper marked with trefoils and squat barrel, is cradled in the Plague Marine's gauntlets. His helmet is a pattern strange to Sahaal, with an air filter on each side, a respirator hose going down to a canister in a pull-to-unlock sheath on his belt and two beady protruding lenses. To Sahaal, the entire thing looks like an archaic gas hood.

Despite the decaying, deathly look, the Plague Marine's posture and the way he scans the terrain suggests that none of his combat skills have been lost over the past millennia. The lenses scan over first the white-painted houses and then the rooftops, before settling on Sahaal's chimney stack. A palpable sense of menace comes from the corrupted Astartes, far more than even his horrific appearance would suggest.

No words are spoken, no battle cries hollered or oaths sworn to various gods. There is only the thump of the rad launcher firing, and the sound of Sahaal sliding down the other side of the roof. He doesn't wait to be exposed to whatever potent isotopes are packed into the grenade, he just runs.

He doesn't stop running until he pushes through the door back to Milliways. Whilst he might have to find some other way to pay off his tab, at least he's still alive.


	36. Immortal

Milliways provides many different opportunities to different people. For some, it provides the opportunity for friendship and comradeship. Others get a safe place far from their chaotic and war-torn universes. Sahaal gets both, but for him, this is not the primary benefit of Milliways. That would be the immortality.

Technically, he already is immortal, in a biological sense. No disease, except those born from the Warp, can touch him. Old age will never affect his genhanced body. Still, before he came to the Bar, he was far from immortal. Even though all Astartes have these benefits, few make use of them. Sahaal's life, like all Astartes, was one of constant war across a hundred battlefields. Very few Space Marines live to see four hundred, and almost none will live past half a millennium, for a death in combat is their destiny. It was Sahaal's.

Now, however, he has a much less lethal home. There's little chance of him dying here, and perhaps, he'll live a lot longer than he would have in the 42nd Millennium.


	37. Human

The snow covers the prints, but not the blood. Cobalt ichor stains the pure white ground in droplets and pools. Hoof prints lie next to them, trailing off down the canyon on an erratic path.

Sahaal stands up from his kneeling crouch, armour servos and muscle-cables whirring. The xeno won't get far, he's sure. He can take his time.

With that in mind, and with his hunter's instincts appeased, he turns back to the smoking pile of wreckage. Twenty minutes ago, this downed craft was a tau dropship, designated Orca-class by Imperium analyst-savants. As far as Sahaal is concerned, it's an apt name for it. One large rectangular section with smooth, rounded corners, kept aloft by four anti-gravity engine nacelles, two on each side. Large and bloated by xenos standards, but still more agile than the bulk would suggest, much like the whales of ancient Terra. A drop-down turret on the topside of the hull holds a pair of burst cannons, and a missile pod for good measure.

It had taken six krak missiles to bring it down, explosive harpoons to impale the beast of ochre metal. The first and fourth shots he made had missed, the munitions wasted on the clear blue sky. His second shot had hit home, blasting away a chunk of fuselage. The third had torn into the rear left engine, the exposed block reduced to a blackened husk of alien machinery. Most accurate of all was the fifth, which blew a hole in the rear deployment hatch, filling the troop bay with hot shards of shrapnel. Lastly was the kill shot, the missile striking the front left engine nacelle, sending the dropship into an uncontrollable spin from which it could not recover.

It rests at the edge of a cliff, the crumpled nose cone pointing down the twisting icy canyon. Most of the flyer is in a relatively small area, intact except for the damage Sahaal inflicted. A few chunks of blackened metal lie in pools of melted snow, scattered around the crash site. There is also other debris, more biological in nature, mangled bodies thrown clear on impact slowly being covered by the falling snow.

Usually in a situation like this, Sahaal would force his way into the dropship, trust his warplate to protect him from the flames and check for survivors. There is no need. The scent of unfamiliar cooking meat is evidence enough.

With nothing else to do in regards to the downed ship, Sahaal heads off down the canyon, following the trail of blood droplets. He has prey to hunt.

* * *

He doesn't know what the tau are doing on this world, or rather were doing, before he killed all but one. He doesn't know where this world is, only that the constellations in the sky are the patterns seen from the trailing southern edge of the Ultima Segmentum, and that's still at least a thousand habitable systems to choose from. He doesn't know what the renegade Astartes were doing here, only that the xenos had routed them, destroyed their outpost on this frozen planet and that they left him an intact and loaded missile launcher. He doesn't even know the damned place's name, if it has one.

All Sahaal knows is that it's habitable, it's cold and there's still a hostile xenos left alive. That last one has to be rectified.

The trail is clear to him, even as more snow comes down in thin flurries. It leads him ever further down the valley, over frozen pools and pale drifts. The Orca is left far behind, and within minutes, not even the faint scent of charred xenos flesh is left to testify to its existence. As far as Sahaal is concerned, it need never have been there in the first place.

He walks, and he thinks. The hunt focuses his thoughts through a lens of extensive experience and mild bloodlust, but he still lets his mind wander to a point. He's never seen a tau before. Not in person, anyway. Sketches and grainy pict-captures are his only reference points. He doesn't, in truth, know much about them either. A few references in the tomes held in the Bar's library have them as highly advanced technologically, with a socialist caste-based system. Sahaal's not a student of political theory, but he's very sure that those words shouldn't go together. He sighs. This is why he doesn't try to understand xenos. That way lies madness.

Still, his first-hand experience is fairly positive. If the group that he just killed is a good example, they put up a good fight but die easily once the more explosive methods are deployed. There isn't much more, in Sahaal's humble opinion, that you can ask for from your enemies and prey.

His train of thought goes on like that for the next ten minutes, all the way down the canyon, until the hoofprints suddenly veer off to the left. He snaps back into focus, and cautiously follows the trail across the recently-virgin snow. The tracks and blood drops lead him across the frozen ground to the cliff wall, and the mouth of a cave. Slowly, and as stealthily as he can be in warplate, he creeps up to the rockface. His black eyes focus on the activation rune for his claws, waiting to unsheathe them.

A stream of fire snuffs out that desire. Well, it's not quite fire, but it's incoming nonetheless. Small blue shots coming from the mouth of the cave superheat the air around Sahaal. One even hits him as he dashes into the cover of a large boulder, the alien plasma scorching away the top few layers of armour on his vambrace. He winces as the intense heat burns the skin of his forearm.

The xeno in there is firing blind, that much is obvious. Still, he thinks, as the counter-pain meds numb his arm, that doesn't mean that the tau isn't a threat. He sighs. If that's what one glancing shot did to him, he does not want to find out what happens when an entire fusillade hits home. It looks like he won't get his fun after all.

Reluctantly, he fishes out a frag grenade from his pouch and taps the activation stud. As soon as he does so, Sahaal throws it over the hunk of granite he's sheltering behind and trusts that his armour's cogitation core calculated the angles correctly. He hears it thud against the rocks, bounce off and hit the cold-hardened dirt of the cave floor. His prey shouts something in its warbling xenos tongue, a warning or a curse or a prayer. A second later, the grenade's internal micro-fuse runs out and the charge it connects to detonates with an earth-rattling explosion.

Sahaal presses himself tighter against the boulder and watches as debris sails over his head. Glowing shrapnel, chunks of blackened rock and giblets of steaming cobalt flesh fly out to hit the snow.

Not as satisfying killing the xeno in close combat, but beggars can't be choosers.


	38. Party

_"What?"_

"You heard me. There's going to be a party on in here." Perhaps. Perhaps not, it's too early for Emcee to have got back to him yet. But, Phocron doesn't need to know that.

"You... you... _you can't_."

"Why can't I? I distinctly remember you saying that all of this was mine. Not yours." Sahaal spreads his arms wide, taking in as much of the vaulted hangar bay as he can.

Phocron is stood by the Storm Eagle's open hatch as Sahaal goes back and forth between it and the dwindling stack of ammunition crates in the corner. It wouldn't do to have some guest tamper drunkenly with the missiles or heavy bolter shells. And, since there's going to need to be space enough for a stage, the gunship has to go too. At least, for the next few days.

"You just can't. You work for the Alpha Legion, this is still technically a Twentieth Legion outpost, not some dance hall." The sniper rifle-wielding legionary might have his helm firmly on, but just from his body language alone, Sahaal can tell that he's annoyed.

"That I do, according to you. But, look at it from my perspective. If I say that this isn't open as a venue option, I'll have to explain why. And, you can be sure that the explanation will involve you wanting it for some sort of secret mission. Do you want that? Our arrangement compromised, all because I wanted to use this for recreational purposes for a night?"

Sahaal can just imagine his the blood draining from Phocron's face as he speaks. He smiles, a wicked twisting of the lips he only gets when he feels like he's turned the tables on someone. As if to punctuate his words, he strides into the open drop bay of the Storm Eagle, his intentionally heavy footfalls ringing on the deck grating. The crate in his hands, filled with lascannon charge packs packed in protective foam blocks, is racked into place above the rows of bucket seating with a little more force and sound than is strictly necessary.

When he comes back out into the bay proper, he picks out Phocron's reluctant resignation in his armoured form before his words confirm it. "No, I don't. Fine. But don't think that I approve of this."

Sahaal just smiles at him in the low-lit gloom. Inside, he breathes a sigh of relief. Given that the Alpha Legion live and die by their secrets, he knew that Phocron wasn't going to let this be exposed. He's just glad that he didn't take the headshot route of ensuring silence.

Ten minutes later, as the Night Lord slots home the last of the steel boxes and starts to prep the Storm Eagle for its first proper flight in a very long time, the Alpha Legionnaire speaks up again.

"I think I liked you better when you were confused. And didn't openly defy my wishes."

Sahaal doesn't respond with words. A flick of the ignition switch, and the subsequent roar of the gunship's twin engines, speaks for him.


	39. Dreaming

Sahaal has always dreamt more than an average Astartes, if such a thing even exists. Usually, these are simply recollections of past events; his childhood on Terra, long-ago battles in the Wars of Terran Unification, Crusade-era compliance actions, the brutal fratricide of the Great War. Usually.

Tonight, he finds himself in the middle of a cemetery, standing between two rows of weather-worn graves. Everything around him seems to be in contrast between death and life. The lush green grass is overgrown, coming up to Sahaal's armoured greaves, and the flowers that had once been laid to commemorate the dead have long since died themselves, just dry husks in rusted metal vases. The church that stands in the middle of the cemetery is small, at least by Ecclesiarchy standards and obviously fell into disuse decades ago. The stones and statues are dirty from years of rain, and plants grow in the cracks. A large tree has even broken through the roof slates in one place.

He walks to the rotting wood doors of the church, and pushes them open, wincing at the noise the rusted hinges make. Inside, it is beautiful, for a house of worship. The tree he had seen from the outside has come up through the main porch, blocking access to the main entrance and the broken wooden galleries above the lines of rotting pews. Green, not the gold he expected, is the dominant colour. Ivy coils around the columns and the walls, whilst grasses, ferns and small bushes come up through the cold, cracked stone floor. Light fills the space from the rent and shattered roof, and a thousand rays shine through the grimy stained glass windows as if split through a prism. As he looks around, Sahaal can see no signs of what religion or belief system the church had once belonged to, but it is clearly not a former holding of the Imperial Cult.

A great circular piece of stained glass had once presumably helped to direct light onto the priest and his pulpit, which sits on top of a small set of steps at the other end of the church. Now, the glass is gone, leaving only an empty stone frame. Two small vestries sit to either side of the altar, but both have long ago collapsed into rubble.

At the pulpit, as if he was a Catholic priest preparing to intone a Mass, is a giant in baroque power armour similar to his own engraved with icons of mortality and judgement. The same midnight blue and brass edging adorn the giant's warplate, and the same lightning bolts strike across painted ceramite. A ragged red cloak is hung over one massive shoulder, almost as an afterthought. Lank black hair obscures the giant's features at first, but at Sahaal's echoing footsteps, he jerks his head up, revealing a gaunt, sunken face. The sheer paleness of his skin speaks to a lifetime spent in darkness, and the unhealthy pallor given to his countenance by the streaming light suggests that he was never meant to be seen in the sun at all.

Sahaal drops to one knee in obeisance, his fist over his hearts. "My lord." This may only be a dream, but supplication when in the presence of his primarch is just that deeply ingrained.

With one of the talons that tip his fingers, Konrad Curze flicks a page of the decaying holy book that calls the lectern home. His eyes snap to Sahaal, thin jet-black ovals staring into crimson vision-blocks.

"Ezekiel 25:17." he says, with fake pomp and a sardonic grin on his face. Curze's demeanor is not that of a preacher, but that of a comedian mocking one. One arm is flung out to the side, the bladed fingertips flashing in the sunlight.

 _"The path of the righteous man,"_ he continues, in the same jesting tone, _"is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"_

Curze makes an elaborate stage bow, like a star performer in front of a loving audience. "So, Talonmaster, what does that passage tell you?"

Sahaal remembers the lessons of his lord well, the lectures on psychology and fear delivered to the Legion. He remembers the sober, serious demeanour of the Night Haunter, a far cry from this snark and joviality. "You've been watching too much Pulp Fiction?"

The primarch laughs, a harsh bark that puts Sahaal in mind of chiropteran wings fluttering. "That's not my fault, my son. You're the one with the television."

Now it's Sahaal's turn to chuckle. "True, father." He pauses, and then says truthfully: "You have no idea how glad I am to see you." It might just be a projection of his subconscious, but still, it's his martyred gene-sire. He wants to savour this.


	40. Garden

It is a beautiful day. A little cold, but it is December, after all. Sahaal is sat on the porch, on a deck chair left over from the summer, looking out at the skeleton trees waving in the wind. No clouds blight the sky today, and the full foot of snow on the ground glints with reflected sunlight.

In his oversized hands, the Night Lord holds a string of finger bones taken from the Balrog that almost killed him last week. His ribs still ache from the fight, and the frozen earth in front of him still bares the scars of that night. But, he killed the damned thing, and that means he's entitled to a trophy.

Old Legion traditions. Trophies worn on warplate, both to show the kills of an individual legionary, and to strike fear into the enemy. Bleached skulls, captured helms, flayed skin and trinkets of bone, memento mori of the most graphic variety, all relaying a simple, unspoken message. Look upon your fate. This is what will happen to you.

_Remember, you too will die._

Sahaal lost his armour's adornments long ago, when he slept away the centuries on the darkened decks of the _Umbrea Insidior_. Time rotted them to dust, and in the months since, he hasn't replaced them. There was no reason to. No real opportunity, either, his time at Milliways hasn't been marked by any memorable kills. Until now.

Five fresh knuckle bones are threaded onto a thick length of paracord tied off at each end. With as much care as he can muster, he stretches the string of grisly reminders out onto a table he pulled over. Sahaal unsheathes his combat knife with a rasp of steel on leather. He leans over the first chunk of bone, and with the precision learnt from four hundred years of bladework, begins to carve.

Technically, it could be called scrimshaw. But, in reality, any practitioners of the art would turn their noses up at his work. His bladetip produces no delicate designs and tells no stories. Instead, he etches five curving Nostraman runes, one on each bleached bone.

 **Daemon** , for what the Balrog must have been, for if it was not Sahaal has no idea what it was, and he would never admit to not knowing anything he kills. **Unknown** , for even with that in mind, the Night Lord will admit freely he has no idea where it came from or how it got to the Bar. **Light** , for how he brought it down. **Vengeance** , for that is the reason that he killed it, vengeance for both Wilford and his ribs.

 **Worthy** , because if nothing else, the beast put up a damned good fight. That's worth remembering, in Sahaal's book. And remembered it will be, for with the bones hanging from his grenade pouch, how could he forget?


	41. Magic

The chapel, or at least what had been the chapel, stands empty, as it has done for three centuries. Frost shrouds everything, from the ragged honour-banners that hang from buckled steel rafters to the broken wooden chunks that once were pews. Illumination is sparse, a few scattered glow-globes running on near-drained emergency power. Starlight, strong from the nearness of this system's sun, is tempered and deintensified by shining through the grimy, ice-rimed stained glass of the windows. Saints and heroes and daemons alike, all buried beneath the coating of filth. Where once demigods worshipped their lord and ruler, nothing, not even vermin, so much as twitches.

Then, in an unprecedented spasm of movement, the door to the nave swings open with a screech of corroded hinges. Sahaal walks out, in his full Mark IV warplate. The buzzing hum of his armour's power cell and the whirring of muscle-cables and joint-servos breaks the centuries long silence. He stops, tunes the noise of his warplate out and listens. A slight mechanical sound, the grav-plates in the bowels of the ship, is faintly audible to his enhanced ears, as is the low hum of the power conduits hidden behind the chapel's stonework façade. Apart from that, nothing.

This would usually be very bad, but tonight, it is very good. Usually, there would be the ever-present roar of the engines, the rumble of the reactors and the sound of thousands of mortal crew attending to their myriad duties. All absent.

A quiet hulk is a perfect hulk to salvage. No enemies, no xenos infestations in the forgotten crawlspaces. No interruptions. Of course, there could still be threats lurking in the shadows, everything from Imperial salvage teams to genestealer hordes to orkoid warbands to even rival Traitor Marines. There are a hundred ways to die on a hulk, the drifting corpses of voidships offering up a plethora of fates.

Sahaal knows he can deal with them. During the decades of the Great Scouring, he stripped more than his fair share of dead ships for supplies, from both sides of the Rebellion. Like a hive world thief, he also knows where he needs to look for the valuables, or in this case, the best supplies.

The first priority is to get to the bridge, and gain access to the diagnostic systems. From there, Sahaal can see which parts of the ship have been too damaged to be of use, and what routes he can take to what is worth salvaging.

Unfortunately for him, the chapel is usually not one of the places he's interested in. Nevertheless, he still checks. Sometimes, the relics are worth taking.

Not this time, though. As he breaks open the oak doors of the reliquary, he lets out a sigh of disappointment. Only a few holy items remain intact, the rest reduced to shards. Of those, none are useful: pieces of old bone, a lock of red hair and a shard of scorched ceramite plate.

Sahaal expects more from his ancient enemies. Worship is not something he ever has been or ever will be comfortable with, but he can at least see from a theoretical standpoint why you would venerate a suit of Terminator armour, for example. Hair, on the other hand? He shakes his head. Moronic.

Quickly, and without any more preamble, he leaves the chapel behind, his foot-claws clicking on the stone slabs that serve as the floor. There's nothing here for him.

* * *

The corridors and hallways of the voidship are typical of Imperial design. Grey metal panels for the walls, heavy-duty bulkheads every twenty metres, access grates for the underfloor power cables acting as the deck and a labyrinth of ventilation shafts and maintenance passageways that fill the space around the main routes. Gothic gargoyles stare out from high up on the walls with dead stone eyes and vox-speakers in their fanged maws.

What is not typical is the bodies. The first Sahaal finds is ten minutes from the chapel, propped up against an emergency locker. It is human, female, in nondescript white and red clothing. The rating is covered, like everything else, in a coating of ice due to the heat exchangers being down. Carefully, Sahaal wipes some of the frost away from her collar to reveal a rank insignia he doesn't recognise, and then scrapes off a thin patina from her shoulder to reveal an emblem he does.

Sewn onto the tough vat-spun fabric is a patch showing an icon of a raven with wings outstretched and a solitary drop of blood in the middle of its body. Sahaal smiles, a savage smirk behind the grille of his helm. The Blood Ravens. He's never personally come across them, but the texts he's found in the library at Milliways from his universe describe them as a tenacious chapter, for thinbloods, with a lot of psykers. The same texts also noted their predilection for deploying a wide variety of arms on the battlefield. If this is one of their ships, then he's hit the jackpot.

"Thanks, Bar," Sahaal says to the freezing void, "Much appreciated."

And it really is. To have just stepped from Milliways onto an Astartes vessel is insanely long odds, but when the door that you stepped through was controlled by a sentient bar? Probability doesn't apply.

Sahaal stands up, and heads deeper into the ship. Every few minutes, he finds another corpse, or a small collection of them, all frozen like a fisherman's catch. He checks each one in turn, finding the same Chapter symbol on the left shoulders of their jackets.

As he checks the bodies of the mortal crew, he starts to notice something. The first woman had no wounds on her that he could see, no signs of a struggle. Her face was calm, as if she was sleeping. In this, she is an outlier. The rest of her crewmates stand, or rather lie, in stark contrast.

Few of the bodies are whole. Most are chunks of frozen meat clothed in ragged uniforms drenched by dried blood. The few intact faces he finds are twisted in agony, locked in a rictus of pain for all eternity. Bulging eyes, wide mouths stretched by screams, mummified fingers reaching out for who-knows-what. None died peacefully. It's like that all the way up to the bridge, forty one decks of death frozen in time.

More disturbing for Sahaal is that he can't identify the massive rents in flesh and bone. They just look like nothing he's ever seen before, and he's seen a lot of dead bodies. His mind immediately jumps to genestealers, but that particular xenoform only infests already dead hulks. Orks would have stripped the power cabling out and made no attempt to hide who took the ship, and given that the conduits are still in place and no crude glyphs adorn the walls, he can comfortably rule them out.

What then? What could take down a ship in service to the Astartes, even if it was only one of the thinblood Chapters? Sahaal doesn't know, but he's sure he'll find out, whether he wants to or not.

* * *

Up until now, most of the bulkheads were open, as if the ship itself was inviting Sahaal into its depths. Apparently, he's worn out his welcome. The large, metre-thick portal stands in his way like an ancient Romanii praetorian guarding his emperor. And, just like one of the long-dead warrior coven, it will not move. Not through brute force, anyway.

With the grinding of servos, he kneels on the deck, the cold seeping in even through his warplate. Sahaal hooks his ceramite-encased thumb under the lip of the keypad next to the bulkhead. A quick flick, and the plastek covering and keys flip up, to reveal a small power cell and some wires. Carefully, and with as much precision as he can muster, Sahaal pulls out one of the wires, tapers the frayed end with his fingers and touches it to the cell. There is a small buzzing sound, then nothing.

Sahaal curses under his helm. He's never taken failure well, but one of his old loopholes being taken away? Anger bubbles up in him like a hot spring, ready to be released as a jet of red hot frustration. Right now, he wants to punch something, and hard.

Instead, he stands up, takes in a deep breath of the stale air his suit's recycling systems provides for him and tries to calm himself down. Another few deep breaths, and his choler lessens. A little calmer, and more able to focus, Sahaal looks around the shadowed corridor, searching for a way to open the door.

Usually, under normal circumstances, a crewman would type in his or her access code and be permitted entry, but that's not possible, given that Sahaal doesn't have a code. His eyes roam over the gunmetal walls, looking for something, anything, to get him in.

With a crooked smirk from behind his vox-grille, he spots the fire alarm. He pulls his combat knife from its sheath, and in one swift movement, smashes the covered plastek with the pommel. A second of silence later, and the alarms begin to blare across the local vox-net. Small hemispheres on the ceiling panels ignite with strobing scarlet light, illuminating their frozen surroundings in pulses. Hopefully, he thinks, the fire protocols haven't changed too much.

A clunking sound from down the corridor draws Sahaal's attention. Opposite the bridge portal, an emergency locker has popped open, revealing a rack of respirators, oxygen tanks, cutting tools and lamp-packs. Dull yellow light illuminates it from a small lumen-strip inside the compartment, to allow rescue teams to find it through clouds of smoke.

He quickly checks the locker, but as he suspected, nothing in there will help him. The thermic lances a damage control team would use to cut through the thick slab-like bulkheads are meant to be used by an actual team of trained professionals, not a lone Night Lord. Besides which, even if he was trained, he'd still need another operator regulating power flow to stop any overloads. Perhaps others would be needed, Sahaal can't tell from just looking at the stored apparatus.

Sighing, and with the alarms still playing their cacophonous symphony, he turns to the last thing the fire alarm should have activated. A large wheel is mounted by the portal, its metal spokes festooned with icicles. The manual auxiliary system is what Sahaal wanted to trigger the unlocking of, and a sharp tug confirms his luck. With a grunt of effort, he spins the wheel clockwise, and inch by inch, the bulkhead is dragged into the ceiling seam.

Sahaal steps over the threshold, and his enhanced eyes pierce the veil of shadows over the bridge. Inside, there is a large space, dominated by a command throne wrought for an Astartes commander mounted on a five metre tall plinth. Concentric circles of terminals surround it, for the masters of ordinance, auspex, deployment and all the other essential departments. The rest of the command deck is rows of lesser cogitator units, arranged in a delta shape. Every single one of the pict-screens is dead and dark.

As with the other compartments, corpses are everywhere. Technical servitors wired to their workstations sit rigidly upright, even in death. Crewmen and officers are propped up in their chairs, held slack by auto-reactive impact harnesses.

What really catches Sahaal's attention, at the basic level, is the light. Elsewhere on the ship, it has been dim glow-globes and failing emergency lumens sucking power from dying generatorums. Here, starlight, strong and blinding, streams in through the main vista-panels. Sahaal turns his head towards the fore of the command deck, careful to check his glare-filters are at maximum.

The armoured shutters that once protected the vista-panels are long retracted, allowing him to look out of the dirty, pitted duracrys. What he sees makes his breath catch in his throat.

A massive storm-whirl, the arm of a Warp vortex, cuts across the inky blackness of the void. Kaleidoscopic colours that hurt to look at stain reality, and the storm shudders and shivers, as if it were alive. What look like hands, or perhaps talons or pincers or even all three at the same time, grasp at the material world, eager to rend and tear. For an instant, the Night Lord looks at one spot a little too long, and for just a second, he swears that an eye forms, with a glacial blue iris and blinks at him. Blooms of esoteric energy and riotous colour flare into existence for a fraction of a second, before disappearing and replaced by others just as large. With an almost tangible force of mental effort, he drags his attention from the roiling wound in space and towards the rest of the incredible sight.

A great blue star, bloated and far along in its life cycle, burns brightly at the centre of this system. In its gravity well, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hulks and wrecks trail on for parsecs. A vast graveyard of steel and adamantium, dancing an elegant waltz in the void. The stream of warp-wrecks stretches for as far as Sahaal's genhanced eyes can see.

He's absolutely astonished. He's seen such places before, processionals of dead voidships that promise rich bounties of salvage and eldritch foes, but this? This is unprecedented. Sahaal takes a step back, his eyes wide. He needs to get more information.

Hurriedly, he heads over to the Master of Record's station, pulling the deceased officer out of his restraint-throne with little effort. With his armoured fingers, he scrapes away the hoarfrost that has formed on the screen. Sahaal isn't familiar with the operating systems that the Imperial Navy uses in the 42nd Millennium, or whenever this ship was lost to the Warp with all hands, but he knows that the basic command lines will still work like sorcerous magic.

 _[£ grep "locational-logs" *.txt]_ he types, searching for any hint on where this treasure trove of salvage is, and where he is. A list of digital logbook entries comes up, all dated between late M40 and mid M41. Most are written by various authors, all with nondescript human names, but one file author stands out from amongst the rest. The last log file created and updated claims to have been written by 'Auto-Locator Subsystem Alpha-Epsilon-Five-One-Nu". Sahaal's brow furrows in thought. Automated systems generally don't make logbook updates.

He selects it, and the monochrome green text contents fill the screen:

**[Clearance Code: Astartes-Corvi-Sanguinem-Tertius]**

**Logbook Entry - 045913-AB3**

**Date of Record (Sidereal) - 9.549.334:M41**

**Last Updated: 9.549.334:M41**

**Thought for the Day - Life is the Emperor's currency, spend it well.**

**\- GLADIUS-CLASS FRIGATE 'SWORD OF KNOWLEDGE' COMPLETED EMERGENCY WARP-REALSPACE TRANSLATION**

**\- STELLAR-LOCATIONAL SCANS INDICATE LOCATION IN MOLIANIS SYSTEM, SEGMENTUM OBSCURAS**

**\- BIOLOGICALLY-TUNED INTERNAL AUSPEX GIVES ZERO RETURNS. ALL HANDS PRESUMED LOST**

**\- DISTRESS BEACONS DEPLOYED**

**\- DATA CORES PLACED IN LOCKDOWN. ASTARTES IDENTIFICATION CODE REQUIRED FOR RETRIEVAL**

**\- ALL PRIMARY SYSTEMS SHUT DOWN TO CONSERVE GENERATORUM POWER**

**\- LOG END**

Sahaal takes all that in with two minds. On the one hand, he now knows what class of voidship he's on, which will help with navigation, and he knows where he is, which will help him get back to this system. But, on the other hand, none of the primary systems are online, so he can't access damage reports or hijack any surviving monitoring picters to look for the best salvage. That, and given that the Molianis system is in Imperial records, that stands to reason that there's some sort of Throne-loyal presence here.

He exits the log file, and runs another command line search for more information on the system. A few taps of the brass keys, and Sahaal brings up an Imperial Celestial Bodies Database report. In it, it describes first the obese cobalt giant of a star, then the trailing river of wrecks stretching out from the Warp into the Materium. Then, it begins to detail the Imperium's staked claims on this solar system.

A Ramilies-class star fort, deck after deck of gun batteries, lance mounts and deep-gauge auspex arrays. Its satellite installations, all the repair docks, fuel tenders and comm-boosters that orbit it like ducklings around a doting mother. Squadrons of frigates, destroyers and system monitors, all with thousands of crew each and fighter wings numbering in the hundreds between them. The moonlets and asteroids hollowed out and colonised just to provide habitats for all the personnel, because even with all that space, the Naval garrison is running out.

And then, it tells him, in that emotionless pixilated lettering, why all of this is necessary.

The Imperium believes, or at least, their stratagists and war-gurus believe, that the harrowing plunge through the uncharted and scourging depths of the vortex have rendered the hulks little threat. They do not see a source of death and pain. They see the mass grave the same way Sahaal does: a resource.

Patrol groups sweep the graveyard for any sign of danger. Teams of voidsmen and armed Naval troopers board each wreck in turn, purging Chaotic taint and genestealer nests before stripping out anything of use to the Imperium.

When he is reading reading those words, Sahaal's throat tightens in what is not fear, because he cannot biologically feel fear, but...unease. Worry, perhaps. But not fear.

To a warband of Traitor Marines, this would be rich pickings. An entire garrison of Imperials, most of which are effectively civilians, sitting on a gigantic cache of rare materiel that could turn the tide in a hundred battles in favour of the True Legions. The exposed flank of the Imperium, a small gap into which the slender stiletto of an Eighth Legion strike force could be inserted. Nowhere near a killing blow, but an easy way to several important arteries.

The bitter reality is that the only one who knows about this is a single Raptor standing shocked on a ruined bridge. Sahaal can do a lot of things, things a regular mortal would relegate to their most insane and self-indulgent power fantasies, but he's nowhere near invincible or invulnerable. He has a bolter, a full combat load of bolt shells, his lightning claws, a knife and a dozen grenades. Nothing close to what even the most ill-defended and unprepared void-outpost would need. Of course, there is always psychological warfare, the terror tactics that come to him like breathing does to another, but while fear is a weapon that never grows brittle, the dread that a single Night Lord brings to the battlefield is nowhere near enough to take on potentially millions of trained military personnel.

So, Sahaal does all he can do. He shuts off the cogitator terminal and heads off in the direction of the armoury, the bone of dead bondsmen crunching underfoot. Hopefully, he thinks, some night he'll return with other sons of the Night Haunter, when he isn't like a mouse in a lion's den. A heavily armed mouse who lives in another dimension, but a mouse nonetheless.

He gets perhaps ten steps, to by the row of control consoles that once managed the reactor, when the previously omnipresent fire alarms are replaced with deeper, blaring klaxons. To be honest, he'd tuned the fire alarms out, relegated them as useless information, like the creaking of the metal decks and the occasional clattering of an icicle melting from the heat his armour's powercell gives off as waste energy. But now, with their change in pitch and tempo, they come to the forefront of his perception once again.

As the alarms scream out their warnings, a burst of vox-corruption sounds from the ornate speaker-horns mounted in the eaves of the command deck. A voice follows, the monotone emotionless cant of some long-dead announcement servitor, the frigate still repeating its recorded messages centuries after decommission.

"Hull breaches on decks seven-nine and eight-two. Boarders on decks seven-nine and eight-two. All available armsmen and weapon-serfs to rally points. Ave Imperator."

Sahaal's first, instinctual response is to hiss, spit and curse his rotten luck and Bar both for delivering him into this particular shitty situation. But, as his venom rises, he forces it down and makes himself remain calm. Focused. Ready.

There is a silver lining to this. If it's the Imperials, coming to scour the ship for imaginary xenoforms, then he can take them. Naval personnel are trained to fight foes much more lethal than themselves, but against a Night Lord, in the dark and in close quarters? He can take them on and win, and he needs the combat practice, because just using the range outdoors at Milliways isn't good enough to stop him getting rusty. He needs targets that fight back and dodge and run.

So, with the sirens singing their warning dirges and the dead-voiced recording going over and over its automated orders, Sahaal sprints from the command deck and into the dark iron catacombs beyond, armoured feet slapping on the icy deckplating.

* * *

Half an hour later, much deeper into the airless network of passageways, Sahaal finally hears something other than the faint clanking of gravitic power plants and the klaxons that still sound out. At first, all his armour's vox-systems pick up are whispered bits of accented Gothic, but as he slows down from his full-speed run, he starts to properly listen.

_"...can't wait much longer, we're on a schedule, you know..."_

_"...be praised, the animus of all circuits, the ghost in the holy shell..."_

_"...no time for this, Hulkenvas, get moving, that's an order, you hear..."_

Snatches of conversation without context, that's all he can hear. It's all he needs. Making haste, Sahaal heads through the maintenance accessways between the main corridors, heading for the source of the voices. The small passages are not like the main vaulted routes through the frigate, they are cramped, barely able to fit the Night Lord. His helm, a priceless Crusade-era relic, scrapes and scratches along the ceiling with the discordant rasp of ceramite on metal. There is no light here, but Sahaal's eyes easily pierce the pitch blackness as if it were a Terran noon.

He quickly makes his way towards the boarding party, the muttering shards of sentences soon becoming fully audible as he gets nearer to the transmission's source. When he finds himself by an iced-open hatch out to a main hallway, he stops, and creeps to the sliver of light that slashes into the darkness. Peering out, he's a little disappointed.

The boarding party seems to be only three mortals in shipboard survival suits and a pair of industrial breaching servitors, hardly a threat to him. One armsman holds a combat shotgun loosely in his hands, and is panning the barrel and its underslung stablight around the shadowed recesses of the corridor. Nothing about his body language shows readiness, and he seems to be more focused on the conversation his comrades are having than on his duties.

The other two are standing arguing with each other as the breaching servitors drill into the sealed bulkhead at the end of the passage. The one shouting the loudest is a woman, with the rank insignia of a warrant officer on her shoulder and a stub revolver in a hip holster. The target of her ire is a lay-technician of the Mechanicus, a low-ranked acolyte trained in the most basic secrets of that strange and esoteric order. A pincered mechandrite coming from his shoulder waves in the airless void like a water reed in a gale as he defends himself. The dataslate in his hand casts a sickly green light that makes his already sallow face look like the portrait of a week-old corpse.

Sahaal doesn't really care what they're arguing about, which is from what he can tell is the time it's taking to cut through the armoured and void-sealed hatch. All he cares about is the fact that they are about to die.

With the utmost care, he unsheathes his right claw blades and sweeps the sharp, unpowered tines across the iron wall panels. The resulting screech of metal on metal shuts up the mortal intruders, replacing the inane chattering with silent, slithering fear. For a moment, none of the Naval troopers move. Then, with a trembling semblance of authority, the warrant officer orders her shotgun-wielding subordinate to check it out. Any normal human would have balked and ran headlong away from the sound. But the man's training takes over, and he walks over, shotgun held high, to investigate.

As soon as the armsman steps out of the light, Sahaal strikes. Four activated talons, wreathed with lightning, punch through the rubber shell to the delicate mortal man inside. His heart is torn to shreds and his ribs are shattered into tiny biological shrapnel. The refractor field of Sahaal's claw cauterises the wounds immediately, staunching the possibility of any blood being spilled. With a clunk, the shotgun drops from its owner's slackening fingers stock-first onto the deck. A death rattle forces its way from deflating lungs and into the local vox-network. Shocked gasps sound from the dead man's comrades back by the bulkhead, their imaginations going into overdrive to come up with something appropriately terrifying and lethal to realise all their pent-up fears.

Sahaal lets that terror build for a few seconds as the sound of their friend's death fades from their comm-beads. Then, he whirls out into the corridor, a midnight clad and lightning wrapped daemon with burning crimson eyes and foot-long claws. Both of the mortals, the woman officer and male lay-technician, scream in pure, unadulterated, primal panic. In the instant before he strikes, he swears he can see the whites of their eyes and their fear-dilated irises.

 _Unguis Raptus_ slices through the little machine-acolyte's vena cava like nothing but air, and he crumples to the floor in a splay of limbs. The single nick along that one, vital vein means that even with all his enhancements, he will die in seconds, his heart pumping out its own lifeblood. With his other gauntlet, he grabs the woman by her neck and smashes her against a wall buttress. She groans in pain, and through the hemisphere of armourglass, Sahaal can see rich red blood trail from a head wound down her ebony skin. For a brief, blessed moment, she is too wrapped up in her agony to notice him. But, as her glands pump adrenaline into her veins, she refocuses her attention to the giant holding her a metre in the air with one hand.

When she catches sight of the ancient skull-painted helm that dominates her field of vision, she can't find the strength to scream again. She does begin to hyperventilate, using up her precious oxygen supplies to mist up her visor. Her eyes twitch like a chem-addict's, roving over everything in sight as she tries to find a way out of her situation.

"Why are you here?" Sahaal asks, his voice rendered unrecognisable by the vox-grille's staticky speakers.

He can see the officer's mouth working silently a moment before her suit's vox-bead transmits it. _"One of the, the auspex jockeys, they picked up signals coming f-from this hulk last week, we were sent to check it out, that and the Angel, he wanted..."_

At the last part of her rambling, fearful confession, Sahaal presses her against the buttress a fraction more. "The angel?"

_"The Astartes, the Angel of Death, the Blood Raven!"_

Well, now. That was much more interesting. Another Space Marine, a loyalist to boot, on board and doing whatever Throne-slave thinbloods do on the wrecks of their chapter's vessels. Probably looking for old finger-bones to take back in order to get a promotion.

As he's mulling this new information over, the officer writhing as best as she can in his iron-hard grip, the vacuum-muted din of the omnipresent metal-on-metal drilling stops. He swivels his head as far as his armoured gorget will let him, just in time to watch the drill-arms of the servitors retract. In unison, the lobotomised cyborgs raise their left pincer-arms and place a small shaped charge into each hole.

Sahaal's eyes go wide as he recognises what the mindless tech-slaves are about to do. Acting quickly, he throws the woman at the bulkhead, uncaring of the grunt of pain and snapping of ribs her vox-line inadvertently delivers into his helm's internal speakers. He runs for cover as the pincer-arms retract and the servitors go limp, the basic orders on their program-wafers fulfilled.

With his hearts pounding and the dull burn of combat-stimms flooding his veins, Sahaal rounds the corner back into the darkness of the maintenance accessway. For a few tense seconds, there is nothing. Then, the explosion comes. A detonation in vacuum is not like a normal detonation. For one, there is no fireball, no glass-shattering shockwave and no sound. No satisfying roar of high explosive destruction.

There is shrapnel, flying out in tiny lethal shards, and that is what Sahaal wants to avoid. His armour could take most of it, but one sliver of metal to one of his lightly protected joints, and he'd be dealing with a void-exposed puncture wound. So, he presses himself into the side passage up against the plating as best as he can, and watches as the twisted shards fly out into the walls and slash apart exposed ductwork and power cabling.

He gives it two minutes before he steps out. By this time, all the shrapnel has either lodged itself or has flown down the airless hall far enough away for it to pose him no threat. Sahaal walks over to the doors, or rather, what is left of the doors. The shaped charges certainly did their jobs, because the massive portals now lie crumpled inside the room they previously blocked.

None of the boarders came through unscathed. When he passes them, both servitors are in pieces on the deck, and the mixture of bionic chunks and mummified flesh has begun to develop a patina of frost over it. The warrant officer is much the same, although she is kept intact by her environment suit, the flash-frozen blood coming from the tears in the armoured fabric speak volumes as to her fate. Sahaal ignores them after the first glances, his curiosity about what lies beyond the shattered doors and what the Imperials would want with it taking over.

He kicks the broken remains of a stub revolver away as he crosses the threshold. Quickly, his eyes cut through the darkness like another's lamp pack would. There, for what seems like the hundredth time tonight, he's shocked. A little.

It seems like the Blood Ravens made some changes to their frigate's layout, because this is supposed to be a serf refectory.

* * *

The auspex he takes from the armoury is top of the line for the mid-41st Millennium, which means that it's not exactly highly advanced by the standards of the wider multiverse. Still, the handheld scanner is good enough for Sahaal's purposes.

He keeps one eye on its fuzzy display screen as he navigates his way through the deep icy gloom of the Sword of Knowledge's upper decks. There's nothing particularly interesting here, or at least for him. For his newest prey, well, that's another story altogether.

The dusty leather-bound volumes in the strange recesses of the Bar's library that first told him of the Blood Ravens chapter mentioned many things. They told him about their mysterious origins and lack of an identifiable lineage. Mention was made of their trophy-taking ways, and how they even pull particularly interesting weapons from the dead of other Chapters. But, most of all, those unknown scribes who had laboured with quill and vellum in faraway scriptoriums had penned quite literal pages about the obsession these thinbloods have for knowledge.

Sahaal isn't a fool. If you want knowledge on a starship, you go to one of three places; the bridge, the library or the cogitation core. The bridge he's checked, and after this long in both the Warp and the void without most of the primary systems active, the tomes and scrolls would have perished. That leaves only one option.

The cogitation core is a supercomputer in every sense of the word. A massive column of data mills, logic engines, mnemonic cell arrays and all the countless other processing devices needed to both run the ship and hold its vast archives. Everything from inventory records to accounts of battles long passed from living memory are held there. The shaft that holds the core is equally impressive, a cylindrical void in the heart of the ship, seventeen decks high. So big, in fact, that access galleries pass through it and the core for maintenance purposes, and gantries fan out from the central column of machinery like the strands of a spiderweb. Or, perhaps more aptly, the branches of some great steel tree.

Sahaal gains access through an airlock-like dual hatch opening onto one of the gantries on the fifteenth deck. The first thing that he realises when he gets through the second door is that the air that he's breathing is not the stale recycled oxygen he's been breathing for the last few hours, but crisp, fresh and cold enough to make his tongue tingle. He smiles. He's glad that he set his rebreather unit to automatic.  It doesn't change the fact that it's voidship air, and tastes like oxyscrubber chemicals, but it's still a welcome change.

The second thing he notices is the smell. Mechanicus incense has a peculiar scent, like a mixture of burning copper and lavender, and it fills the massive silo. Underneath that, though, is another even more familiar smell, the combination of cleaning ungents and lapping powder, with just a dash of sweat. All Astartes, from the most debased Chaos Marine of the Word Bearers to the loyalists of the Ultramarines, smell like that. Sahaal does. This Blood Raven does.

Sahaal moves along the gantry. The ill-maintained metal creaks and groans like a wounded soldier under his feet. As quietly as he can and as the environment will allow him, he descends the shaft on the maintenance ladders, and where those have broken away, by jumping from walkway to walkway. If it were up to him, he'd have his jump pack with him for this, but its weight and size would have made it impossible to use on the hulk. Still, though, it would be useful here, he thinks.

When he gets to the third level, he stops and peers over the flimsy metal railing. There, below him, are the rest of the Imperials on board. Three mono-tasked processor servitors and a red-robed tech-adept, all plugged into the cogitator's input ports. A massive pict-screen is mounted above them, the display showing a mass of binaric code and strange arcane symbols Sahaal doesn't understand.

Two armsmen, armed with the same model of combat shotgun and clad in the same pattern of voidsuit as their comrade by the armoury, stand by the door. Neither is a threat. The last member of the group, the one standing in contemplating silence off to the left, however, is.

Sahaal wasn't sure what to really expect when it came to the Blood Raven. Perhaps some scholar-warrior, festooned with icons of learning and authorship. Or, maybe, a transhuman fighter in some ancient suit of armour, a novice in the wargear of his distant brother-ancestors. Instead, the Space Marine is quite typical of the new normal of the early 42nd Millennium.

He is shorter than Sahaal, though only by four inches or so. His plate is standard Mark VII, Aquila pattern, and the boltgun in his fists is a Godwyn Mk Vb, identical to the thousands of others stamped out on every forge world near a fortress-monastery. Crimson ceramite, with bone white pauldrons and black kneeplates, gleams in the wan yellow illumination of the portable worklights affixed to the wall.

Sahaal can take him down with no problems.

Simply dropping to the ground floor would be effective at seizing the element of surprise, but Sahaal doesn't want surprise. This isn't one of those trashy horror films on the TV at Milliways, he doesn't go in for jump scares. His watchwords are fear and panic.

So, he pulls out the other items he plundered from the abandoned armoury. The long-sealed vault of weapons hadn't held much of interest to him, all strange patterns of heavy weapons and suits of armour more decoration than any true tool of war. His way has never been one that involves the liberal use of plasma cannons and missile launchers. But, that is not to say that there was nothing he could use there.

In quick succession, he thumbs the activation studs of four grenades and drops them from his vantage point. The first to hit the ground, near to the Blood Raven, is a blind grenade, an olive-green canister of inky black smoke held in tight by the thin metal. Next, a fraction of a second later and in between the two shotgun troopers, is a standard frag grenade, the same sort that men killed each other on Old Earth with. After that, the one plasma grenade the armoury had held lands in the middle of the small party, the seething corona inside eager to escape and kill. Lastly, but most certainly not least, a haywire grenade from Sahaal's own stash joins the plasma in the centre of the soon-to-be killzone.

The effects are staggered, in a certain way. In theory, all of the small containers of death and confusion land and activate within a second, but in practice, with the slick of combat-narcotics and all-natural adrenaline flooding his bloodstream, it feels like so much longer. First is the choking cloud of smoke, which quickly fills the room with a low-hanging haze. Then, it's the frag grenade's turn. Its hot shrapnel and explosive core tear into the two armsmen, and just like the warrant officer, their suits are no real protection from the flying shards of death. Both men crumple to the floor in ungainly heaps, blood running through the grated floor. A bright flash cuts through the smoke, the sickly green plasma rushing out to engulf everything in the area. Even as the Blood Raven turns away from the blinding light, the grenade's payload splashes over his warplate, stripping away the upper layers of ceramite and ablative armour and reducing the squad markings on his left side to bare grey. Finally, after what seems like an eternity to Sahaal's mind, the haywire grenade goes off, sending an electromagnetic pulse out. The blast fries the cybernetic alterations of the tech-priest and his servitors. All three jerk and shudder from the overload as both their bionics and the few bits of connected flesh left to them burn out.

Sahaal watches all of this play out over a single heartbeat, a grin on his pale face. He whispers a single word in Nostraman to his armour's machine spirit, an instruction and invocation at the same time.

"Preysight."

Specialised lenses slide over his helm's vision blocks, and for a brief instant, his heads-up display is a wash of static. Then, the world dissolves into a blue-coated facsimile of itself, with the slowly cooling bodies of the armsmen highlighted by patches of red. The Mechanicus priest is a writhing mass of bright orange, as are the bionics of his servitors. The Blood Raven is pure white hot heat.

"In your name, my father. As always. Ave Dominus Nox."

With the thermal-sight active and his own whispered words echoing in his mind, Sahaal jumps into the obscuring smoke, falling three stories soundlessly. As much as he dislikes projectile weapons and their crudeness, he can't deny their effectiveness. That's why, for the first time in many, many weeks, _Mordax Tenebrae_ draws blood. He pulls his bolter from where he keeps it on his thigh as his taloned feet hit the deck, and he's already running with it in hand as the echo of his impact echoes into the dizzy heights of the shaft.

Two shots ring out, fiery trails racing out from his barrel. One of the mass-reactives smashes like a hammerblow against the Blood Raven's pauldron, cratering away one of the outstretched wings painted there. The other tears hungrily at the loyalist's helm, ripping through the external vox-uplink and shattering one of the jade eye-lenses.

With a snarl, the Blood Raven pulls his damaged helm off, blinking at the stinging smoke. The face revealed from underneath is unremarkable, the very definition of forgettable. Pale skin, a shaven head dusted with brown stubble and dark eyes. A few white slashes mark him, well-healed battle scars. There is a nobility to his brow, even with blood running down it, and zeal in his eyes. The loyalist is young for a Space Marine, maybe eight decades old by Sahaal's reckoning. He straightens, fixes Sahaal through the artificial mist with those hateful, dogma-filled irises and twists his lips into a snarl.

"I am Jacintus, of the noble and just Blood Ravens Chapter. I am your death and hatred, heretic. Prepare to meet your foul gods."

In contrast, Sahaal looks nowhere near noble. His armour is intact, but it is blood-spattered and streaked with painted lightning bolts. A white skull design leers from his faceplate with burning coals for eyes. No upright dignity can be found in his demeanor, only an instinctual readiness to fight.

"I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Eighth Legion. Better warriors than you have tried."

He unsheathes his claws, the long adamantium claws sliding from grooves in his gauntlets with a whispered rasp. Lightning crackles across them, a very real aura of shackled, destructive energy.

"And they are not my gods."

The fight that follows is also quite the study in contrasts. Jacintus fights the way his Chapter and the Codex decree, tactics passed down like ancient nuggets of wisdom from the dawn of the Imperium. He fights with bolter and combat blade both, firing and slashing at the same time. One of his mass-reactives gouges a chunk of ceramite from Sahaal's left pauldron, the midnight armour shard spinning away into the shadows of the shaft. The other hits the deckplating, exploding on a slight time delay to drive chunks of hot shrapnel into his less-protected knee joint. Jacintus's blade, a monomolecular short dagger, slices away at Sahaal, raking lines of bare ceramite into his gauntlets and vambraces. Nearly a dozen times, the tip cuts into the lightly-armoured joints of his fingers, or gets into the gaps between plates. Blood, rich and crimson, dribbles from these cuts in small streams, and Sahaal has to clench his teeth hard to stop himself crying out in pain.

Sahaal, on the other hand, fights like a Night Lord, with no decorum or honour or anything remotely resembling it. His talons tear into Jacintus's guard, first hooking, then tearing away the layers of ceramite from his armour. He goes for the left side, the damaged, more vulnerable side. He slices and cuts and rips and tears at it, even as the loyalist's ill-aimed shots batter his armour and gouge his flesh. The knife makes him bleed, and quite a lot, there's no denying that, but he grits his teeth against the pain and channels his agony into anger.

He is the First Captain of the Eighth Legion. He can hurt this thinblood bastard a lot more than he can be hurt.

And he does. With his blood staining his gauntlets red, he finally hits flesh after all the layers of armour, and his reward is the barely choked back scream of the Blood Raven. Sahaal doesn't stop there. He keeps going, as if the sight of steam coming from the cauterised wounds drives him on. Bones shatter. Muscles tear and fray. Flesh is seared, torn open so much that there should be litres of blood coming from ruptured veins, but none flows where the lightning claws cut.

Jacintus is screaming at this point, in a mixture of pain and rage and frustration. Prayers and howls and curses all mix into one immiscible blend of sound. Tears bead at the edges of his eyes. From failure or from the waves of agony, Sahaal doesn't know or care.

When one of Sahaal's claw tines bursts both of the young battle-brother's hearts, there's one last cry, and then silence. The ruined, bloodsoaked, armoured corpse slides off his talons to the deck. Sightless glassy brown eyes stare up the length of the shaft.

Sahaal just stands there for a minute, blood running down his hands and pooling on his feet. Pain-suppressors are kicking in, taking away his suffering and replacing it with a cooling numbness. Coagulants in his genhanced blood are slowing the bleeding to a trickle, and scabbing over the cuts. Unguis Raptus, having served their deadly purpose, slide away and out of sight with a click. His newly unclenched hands reach out for the damaged, blood-sprayed helm on the floor, hid fingers rubbing over the Chapter crest on the forehead as Sahaal hooks it to his belt. A trophy, one he'll hang from his warplate in the nights to come.

It's just when he's thinking about heading back to the chapel and home again when the buzzing hum of anti-gravity technology fills the air. Sahaal turns his head to look, and sees a servo-skull lift itself from the top of a sanctified control panel and float towards him. The repurposed cranium stops two meters from him, and hovers a few feet off the ground. A beam of scarlet light shoots out from an ocular implant set into its eye socket, scanning Sahaal from head to toe. Usually, Sahaal would be irritated at this, but right now, too much has happened tonight for him to care.

The beam snaps off, and the servo-skull beeps, a small high-pitched tone of acknowledgement. A sharp burst of static comes from a speaker set into the discoloured bone, and then an emotionless machine-made voice is piped out.

_"Adeptus Astartes markers received and accepted. Unknown Chapter, unknown rank. Replaying message."_

The voice cuts off, but is soon replaced by the deep bass tones of an Astartes.

_"Greetings, cousin. My name is Captain Valius Mito of the Fifth Company, Night Watch. I am very glad you've come to Molianis, for we have need of a fresh set of eyes on events here."_

His voice lowers pitch, and fatigue bleeds into his words. _"This system is on the outskirts of the Spurrier Spiral Nebula, and therefore under our watchful gaze and protection. Whilst the Imperial Navy may hold the outpost, it is myself and my brothers that truly cleanse the hulks here, but in recent months, we have been overstretched."_

A sigh, laced with static, comes through the tiny speaker. _"Warbands of every Traitor Legion. Increased genestealer activity. Ork hordes from the enclaves in the Straits of Halk. Even eldar have been sighted on the outer planets. I have only four squads here, I cannot repel all of these threats alone, and I know for certain that all of these and more hide in Molianis. Help me, cousin of mine, and bring your chapter's tactics to bear with those of the Night Watch, and we can shore up our defences here. This is the outer edge of the Imperium, and the borderlands of the Emperor's domains. We must hold it, for the sake of all His subjects. Come to us, in the upper levels of the star fort, and stand by our side."_

Sahaal grins through the soporific haze of the pain-suppressors. This has turned into quite the interesting day trip. But, that's the magic of Milliways for you. Every trip out is an interesting one.


	42. Bar

Hallway 800 in Milliways is quite archetypal, as residential corridors go. Twenty rooms, accessed through carved wooden doors with little metal plaques held on with two nails each. White Arabic numerals designate the room numbers, from 800 to 820, and below them on the same metal square is the name of the patron who lives there. The carpet is a dark scarlet, flattened down by who-knows-how-many years of feet of all shapes and sizes. Shaded lights give the corridor an evening ambiance, at all times of the day or night, if such a thing is applicable or even relevant here.

The wallpaper is a dull green, mostly covered by paintings, posters and pictures in a variety of frames and on a variety of subjects. There's everything from the black and white photograph of an American diner, to the Scarface matinée card by Sahaal's room, to the painting outside 808 that he's sure is an original Jackson Pollock. Sahaal's not sure why there's such a range of decoration, but he likes it nevertheless.

His favourite part about Hallway 800 is the snapshots he gets of other people's lives. A fragment of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song about a girl named California at four in the morning. The smell of hot borscht wafting through the cracks around a door. Packages piled high outside 809 before a slight girl reaches her long, skinny arms out to grab them and pull them inside. The couple who live next to him arguing, having sex, or somehow combining the two.

He often wonders what other residents see of his life, or if they notice the same things he does. He doubts it, somehow. Everyone's always so busy.


	43. Fucking Milliways

Sahaal sits on the edge of the spire, and watches a city burn.

He has his helm off, the skull-painted armour piece sitting by his side, the scarlet lenses staring out blindly. The wind tousles his shaggy black hair, whipping it around his pallid face. In his deep black eyes, firelight from below glints. He draws in smoky air through his nose, smelling the death and destruction. A smile curves his cold-chapped lips.

This morning, if he had sat in the same place as now, his view would have been radically different. Below, a great forge of the Mechanicus would have resounded with the sound of manufacture. War machines for the Imperium's armies would have rolled off assembly lines the size of a standard city block. Great chimneys would have belched out sooty smoke. If he had looked down, he would have been blinded by the blazing furnaces, the acetylene sparks and the flashes of weapons being tested on range-plazas.

Above all, the streets and manufactorums would have thronged with people. Indentured workers, lay-technicians, tech-adepts, disposal teams, augmented Skitarii warriors, all together underneath a sky turned grey-black by rampant industrial pollution. It would have been like the ancient depictions of Hell, crowded, dirty, and full of overwhelming flame and noise.

Now, it is still like that, but with a few key differences. Since Sahaal detonated a bundle of demolition charges and Astartes-grade fuelcells by the main reactor, there has been significantly less people around. A truly massive series of craters makes up most of the forge at current, the result of a wildcat destabilisation through the linked series of power plants that once served the armaments factories here. What isn't glassy hollowed-out earth is smouldering ruin, the once-ornate Gothic buildings and iron machine-temples reduced to rubble. Fires burn in the fuel storage depots, the sky turned inky black by columns of promethium smoke. Corpses litter the streets.

Sahaal looks over the devastation with a satisfied gaze. Not bad for a day's work. Of course, it helped that the explosions and radiation did most of the work for him, but still. He did set it in motion.

This place has been on his list of targets for a while now, ever since he started striking out at the Emperor's domains from Milliways. It used be the main production nexus for battle tanks in the Talean Rim, a forge-region just behind the frontline systems of the Endorian sub-sector. More specifically, the ones currently being ravaged to hell and back by Night Lords warbands. He can't help his Legion brothers directly. Too risky to his own life, and not just because of the heavy fighting. There are more than a few sons of his father who would rather him a corpse strung up on a tank than a Raptor in the thick of combat, or a commander of the VIII Legion.

Still, enough like him alive to make him want to help them any way he can. Not having as much armour being thrown at them seems like a good place to start. Plus, he does have his other reasons.

He turns from the inferno, and reaches into the ammunition crate by his side. A bottle, wrapped in a square of cleaning cloth, is pulled out. Gently, he unwraps it, revealing a black label and sloshing liquid. Sahaal unscrews the top and takes a slug of the Jack Daniels. The bourbon burns its way down the back of his throat. He licks his lips, and raises the bottle to the charred landscape.

"Happy New Year, you warpshit bastards. Here's hoping I can put a few more of you in the ground than last year."

Those words get him thinking. It's been one of the strangest years of his life, and when that life has been stretched over four centuries, that says something. He could never in his wildest dreams have seen himself here this time last year.

For one, at that point in time, he was fleeing for his life with only a young psyker for company. Months of being hunted by the Inquisition, running from system to system to escape an ever-tightening noose. Those days had been hard, especially with both him and Mita injured from their battles. It was a wonder that they had lasted for as long as they did, but of course, it had to end sometime, somewhere.

That somewhere had been a hive world Sahaal didn't know the name of, in a street too unimportant to merit a name. He and Mita were separated after a riot that they had started to cover their escape had gone badly. He tried to find her, but instead, a fireteam of Throne Agents had found him. When he had ducked into that doorway, he had been convinced that that was where he was going to end his life. Alone. Wounded. Dying from a volley of hellgun shots to the chest.

But that hadn't happened. Sahaal had gone through the doorway and emerged at the end of the universe. At first, he'd thought he'd gone insane. He'd spent three months in his room, isolated from everyone else, and trying his best to make sense of the situation. When he finally came out of his darkened chamber, things had actually got better. New surroundings. New food. A sort of job, handling Happy Hour as and when he needed it. New people, especially. Guide, Cassian, Emcee, Cassidy, Wilford, Ellen and Bonnie and her fair.

It had helped that it gave him a new reason to get back into the Long War, using the bar's transdimensional door to hit targets that no one else could, like this forge world here. Before, he had been lost, but now he was more certain of himself and his purpose than ever before. There was clarity, and joy, and a safe home waiting for him after every mission. What more could he ever want?

Sahaal raises the bottle high again. The sky begins to shine in a bluish corona of light as night falls, the phenomenon known as _Mechanicus Borealis_. Beautiful, even if it's caused by radiation ionising the particles in the air. "To you, Milliways. May this year be as interesting as the last one."


End file.
